


Cela Signifie Probablement Quelque Chose En Français

by EXNativo, Krazyfan1



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Australian Main Character, Bad Puns, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Gen, I'm having none of your shit Hawkmoth, Original Character Insert, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-03-10 11:47:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13501122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EXNativo/pseuds/EXNativo, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krazyfan1/pseuds/Krazyfan1
Summary: I was expecting a fair bit when I moved to Paris. New surroundings, new people, and maybe some snow. What I hadn't expected was to step off the plane and into a brand new world of magic and heroes. I suppose a quiet life was a bit too much to ask for after everything I had done, but would it have killed that old man to find me a job that wasn't in a school?Cross posted from FFN.





	1. Chapter 1

There's a lot one can say about moving to a new country.

You could comment on the dramatic shift in culture. Perhaps what is legal in one place isn't so in another. The people surrounding you are almost certainly different to what you'd grown to expect.

"Holy _shit_ , France is fucking _cold_ in the winter."

Of course, the obvious is always a solid option to take. You would almost never be wrong, and it's a great way to break the ice. Maybe I could use it to bust my way out of the snowdrift I'd managed to fling my rental car into.

It was my own fault, really. I shouldn't have demanded that the woman behind the counter give me the cheapest piece of shit they had, provided it could get me to my new address in Paris. I think the English may have thrown her off, because she obviously didn't fucking understand my request all too well.

Now here I was, an Aussie hardened in battle against wilderness and flames, huddling beside the smallest automobile imaginable to escape the gorgeous snowflakes that were in the air. Nothing to keep me warm except a psychology degree that was apparently completely useless in my home country, and a vague understanding of the French language at best.

So, fair to say that this day sucked. But it always could be worse.

At least the butterflies were pretty.

**XxX**

**_"Ice is such a bother, is it not?"_ **

The voice flooded through my mind like molten chocolate that had been dipped in gravel. I poked my head out of the fluffy confines of my jacket, taking a moment to cross my eyes and decide that, yes, that _was_ a strange neon outline wrapping around my face.

The road I was broken down on was by no means uninhabited, but there weren't all that many people around. All I could see were a few more cars in the distance, and a woman walking down the street towards me. She stopped dead in her tracks when I caught her eye, took one look at my face, and twisted on her heel, running back the way she had come and screaming some foreign word all the way. I guess she wasn't the source of the grumbling baritone I'd heard.

So, had I imagined it? Odd. I could have _sworn_ that I'd already taken my meds earlier than morning. And even if I hadn't, then I probably wouldn't be talking to myself in _French._ But just to be sure…

"…Who said that?"

A wave of… something came over me. Even if I couldn't see it, I could still _feel_ it crawling over my skin and _hot damn_ the world sucked. Everything was horrible and my life sucked and _oh shit it's just like when I was a teenager all over again make it stop-!_

 ** _"I am Hawkmoth."_** That was the name of ultimate power. It was a very cool name and it would give me anything I could ever want and even thought the name could have been cooler like Sphingidae SERIOUSLY DID I MENTION HOW I WOULD GET ANYTHING I EVER WANTED IF I JUST LISTENED TO THIS VOICE? **_"You may think of me as a fellow hater of the snow, Wildfir-"_**

Hang on a second.

"Well, I mean, snow's actually pretty cool."

Much like vomiting after a great night out at a bar, the elated feeling of energy was leeched out of my body like air out of a punctured balloon. I almost fell over at the abruptness of it all, one moment it was there and the next it was simply _gone._

**_"Did you just-"_ **

"Yeah, I did, sorry." The voice spluttered while I leaned against the freezing metal of my fucked car. I got the feeling that it wasn't accustomed to being interrupted, but this was all in my mind and it hadn't even existed before now… right? "But you never see this stuff back in Victoria. Even if it's a pain in my ass, it's quite nice to look at."

All was silent for a moment. In that moment, I began to wonder if maybe continuing this conversation was truly for the best.

 ** _"Yes. Yes!"_** The voice rallied back, sounding far more confident as it went along. **_"Ah, yes, snow is magnificent, isn't it, Avalanche?"_**

"The name's Lukas, actually." Though really, you'd expect me to know that. Come on voice, catch up.

Kicking a leg up against the rental car, I gave my nails a cursory glance, dutifully ignoring a passing car and its inhabitants screaming about some lady and her blog. Fucking France, dude, what even. "No last name, I left that behind with the rest of my family."

The car that had just passed me honked its horn. I waved to them absently, in an attempt to convey that I wanted them to move on, which only got them to honk again.

 ** _"You… Ugh, tourists."_** Ohh, they weren't honking, they were _screaming_. That… made sense? **_"Look, that isn't how this works. You're Avalanche now."_**

It would be so easy to just be Avalanche. The world was in the wrong, the world had screwed me over constantly. I'd barely even managed to get off the plane before everything was going up in flames. I hated the heat. I hated the fire. The planet would be encased in a layer of frost that could be felt from the sun, if only I did what the voice wanted. It would be _SO EASY_ -

I forcefully cut myself off with a sharp slap across my own cheek. The butterfly outline around my face dimmed for a moment, something I barely took the time to acknowledge as I started on one of the more basic breathing exercises I'd been taught. No mind-numbing hatred permitted, no brain power being dedicated to apocalyptic thoughts or plans. Those weren't allowed in my head anymore. So help me, me, do not make me come up there!

Hey, was the air feeling a bit warmer than it had been a second ago? Eh, probably just my imagination. I'd been told in the past that it was fairly active.

"Yeah, nice try, voice in my head." I rubbed the stinging skin of my cheek delicately. Was that a groan I could hear? "You sound cool as fuck and all, but I can't go around letting you and yours come up with names for me. My therapist said that it wasn't healthy."

**_"If you're going to sass me, at least have the decency to do it in French, you cur."_ **

Okay, now _he_ sounded mad.

That was still no excuse for me to take his abuse. Crossing my arms, I stuck my nose up in the air, giving no regard to the car that was slowing down as it neared me.

"I don't speak very good French, dipshit." I said, in perfect French. The car sped back up, and I could see the driver's tinted window winding back up as they passed me. "I can barely do English."

Yeah, that did it, I sure showed him… wait.

_…What le fuck!?_

**_"I tire of this back and forth, Avalanche. Go forth and fetch me the Miraculous, now."_ **

I had an image in my mind of a tall man, wearing a ridiculous mask and even more ridiculous costume, rubbing at his eyes in frustration. He didn't look like he tolerated insolence _or_ incompetence, which must have made the day he received his get-up incredibly awkward. Unless he made his own clothes, but, really, who did that nowadays?

"What the ever-loving _fuck_ is a Miraculous?"

 ** _"Well, I could tell you."_** Great. Now the voice was being snide. Could I say welcome to France, or had I not lived here long enough to make that not racist? _Was_ that rac- oh forget it. **_"Or you could go into battle with Ladybug and Chat Noir with the powers I'm trying to give you, and then you could see them with your own two eyes!"_**

A bug and a cat? Yeah, okay, I was going off the deep end.

"Dude, it's a bug. Just use a fucking pesticide or something, no need for miracles." I thought ladybugs were averse to cold, too. What the fuck kind of mythical land was my mind painting France up to be? "And what's this about black cats?"

 ** _"Good, you're getting angry."_** Was I? I hadn't even noticed. Time to restart those deep breathing exercises, I suppose. ** _"You will be a powerful one indeed. Channel that anger, and do as I say!"_**

In, out. In… in… iiinnnn… and _out_.

"Nah, I gave up on anger. Too tiring." A bird in a nearby tree began to chirp. The chunk of ice that I broke off the window of my rented car and hurled at it _just_ missed, but it did make it fly away. "You are beginning to annoy me, though. So, grats."

**_"Well then, channel that annoy-"_ **

I yawned, cracking my jaw and effectively cutting off the voice for the second time in as many minutes.

"Nope. I'm done with this conversation." I leaned further into the freezing metal of the car, my survey of the landscape being cut short as something behind me groaned. I pushed myself off the side of the car, which turned out to be a quite large mistake, if the way a wheel fell off as it slowly tipped further into the ditch until it rolled over entirely was any indication. Shaking my head, I kicked the tire into the ditch with the rest of its useless parts.

Where were you on that one, physics?

"Fucking voices in my head, taking up my time when I should be getting this stupid car outta this fucking ditch." What could only be described as a light breeze blew through the area. The windshield of the car exploded inwards, as though a bomb had gone off. "Probably gonna lose my deposit on it…"

**_"If I get your car out of that ditch, will you repay me by taking Ladybug and Chat Noir's Miraculous'?"_ **

Iiiiiiinnnnnnnn…

"Look dude, I've fought cats before. Little shits are vicious. So, I'm just going to call a tow-truck or something." Nothing was worth getting into a fight with a cat. Not even the potential benefit of getting to punch an asshole cat in the face, and there were a _lot_ of asshole cats in the world. "Thanks for keeping me company through these trying times. And the impromptu French lesson, however the hell you managed that."

My sarcasm was powerful.

**_"You know what, I'm going to go find someone else to Akumatise. Good luck with your automobile."_ **

"Thanks, Mothbro." I was just going to pretend that I knew what that even meant. Partly because I had other things to occupy my time with, but mainly because I really didn't give any iota of a shit. "Good luck with your stuff too."

**_"Yes, yes…"_ **

The butterfly outline faded from my face. I could tell because it no longer hurt to keep my eyes open, what with the blinding light a few centimetres away from them gone, and a single glance into part of the car's shattered mirror proved it. Though speaking of the car…

I crossed my arms and looked over the damage that had been done. Let's see… missing tire, shattered windows and mirrors, filthy _everything_ … As far as I could tell, it wasn't so bad. And of course, I chose that moment to blink, and in the milliseconds that my eyes were closed, the entire thing had managed to fall apart.

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the acrid stench of oil. Trying to take a step, I ended up kicking a flaming bolt that had been lying at my feet. The thing flew with inhuman speeds towards the wreckage, and the last thing I saw before the entire thing went up in flames were the headlights and licence plate, all twisted into what could almost be described as a portrait of agony.

I'd never seen the front of a car that was so expressive. Which also meant that I'd never seen a machine that looked to be in pain moreso than that instant.

An unholy shriek tore apart the air. It took me a moment to realise that it was the metal of the car's chassis crumbling apart, and not the Gates of Hell opening beneath my feet. Given everything else that had just occurred, I wouldn't have been surprised if that had been the case.

"Well, shit."

Guess I was _walking_ to Paris.

**XxX**

The process in which I found my way to Paris was long and complicated. So long and complicated that I don't feel like writing it all down. Just know that it took a newspaper, a goat, and a strange woman named Tammy whom claimed to be able to see spirits.

The process in which I found my way to the small apartment I was renting was, in comparison, like trying to marry that goat. It was strange, complex, more than likely illegal, and I couldn't be certain that it had actually happened until I saw some conclusive evidence of my involvement. I was still waiting on that last one, and until it came, nobody could prove anything!

It started with me sulking in the snow for a little while, a process of about ten minutes. After that, there was a flood of red and black light, and the rental car was as good as new. Thoroughly confused and hoping that I would soon awaken from this fever dream before I froze to death in whatever pile of snow I'd fallen unconscious in, I'd set off once more.

A few twists and turns, a passing glance at a few monuments, a newspaper, a goat, Tammy, and more than likely some road rules broken later was around about when an old man in a Hawaiian shirt had leaped out into the road. I say leaped, because he was coming at my car with arms wide open like it was a friend he hadn't seen in years. I hit him before I hit the brakes, and he was able to give me directions through this strange alien city after I peeled him off the road. Dude must have been made of iron; he dented the fucking bumper bar.

"Left up the road, you can't miss it," he'd said. I'd missed it five times after that. "You're such a polite young man," he'd also said. I nearly accidentally hit him with my car again when I tried to reverse out of the parking space. He'd hobbled away after that. I wouldn't be surprised if there were police waiting for me at my new place.

Speaking of my new place, I'd finally managed to track it down. It was an apartment building in one of the more upscale areas, just down the road from a bakery that had some of the best croissants I'd ever tasted. It was seven floors of bright white paint, opening into a lobby was fairly basic rectangular shape. Paintings dotted the walls and comfortable enough looking furniture dotted the floor. A girl younger than myself, who was manning the counter, and a man holding a clip-board near the elevator were the only two people there, both looking equally bored.

The girl almost looked relieved when I flashed the card that had been sent to me in the mail, back before I'd left Australia. Apparently, if what she'd told me was true, it was my key into the apartment on the fifth floor that I'd paid a full month's rent for in advance.

I slipped the pen out of the man's hand and signed my name on the bottom of the page as I walked past, recognising the man's uniform as belonging to the company that had dragged all of my belongings halfway across the globe for me. His tip had been one of the Monopoly-money looking notes I still had left over in my wallet, with a '20' printed on it. He didn't look pissed off at me, so I could only assume that it had been an alright amount.

I'd opted for the stairs rather than the elevator, taking them two at a time. My door was three down from the stairwell opening on the right, a large '5-F' printed on the front and a little black box on the wall beside it. I trudged down the corridor slowly, straining my ears for any indication of neighbours; going off noises alone, it seemed 5-A was a meth lab and 5-D was hosting an orgy.

5-E may have been murdering someone. Or that was just the next level of the orgy, who knew.

Once I'd reached my door, I'd pressed my keycard up to the black box, for lack of anything better to do. A second later, the machine beeped, a small red light that I'd not noticed while I was walking up flickering to green. I'd pushed the door open, before curiosity got the better of me and I turned back around to glance at the neighbouring doorways.

5-B's light was the only one of the door I'd walked past that remained red. All the others were a slow, blinking orange, which I could only assume signified that the owners were all home. Looking the other way, I saw a small collection of red, a larger concentration of orange, and a green light cheerfully flashing next to an open doorway that had soft, classical music floating out of it.

I'd have to ask reception if it were possible to have my light be red at all times. Because, you know, people. If they knew that I was home, it might make them think that _they_ were welcome. Which, ew.

The inside of the apartment was fairly simple. A small hallway led to a lounge room on one side and a kitchen on the other. Beyond the kitchen was a desk and table, overlooking the glass door that led to the balcony. It was all very open, aside from the bathroom tucked away in the back, and both doors on either side that led to the bedrooms. Why I'd put forth the money for a second bedroom, I couldn't tell you. Maybe just in case rent got to be too much and I needed a roommate, possibly? Hell if I knew _why_ I'd done even half the shit I'd done in the past, but at least you couldn't really go wrong with having a second bedroom handy.

All the pieces of furniture were where I'd requested (and paid top dollar to ensure) them to be. Large, plush couch and an even bigger television, king beds, various appliances. The computer sat upon the desk, graciously hooked up entirely, though I'd be waiting until later into the afternoon to get the internet connected. All in all, it was fairly opulent; something I could be happy with, even if I wasn't entirely happy with what I'd done to get that far.

It also left me with very little to do, unless I wanted to go out and explore the City of Love a little. Which I wouldn't, because let's face it; I would need to see about refilling my prescription before I could confidently be around other people. I'd thought the dosage to be correct, but obviously, if I was both having audio and visual hallucinations _to that level_ , it would likely need to be tweaked at least a _little_.

So, I had two options. Hook up all the gaming systems that I'd brought with me and leave this newest responsibility to fester until I could no longer contain it, or call the rental car company and plead my case. Considering leaving responsibilities to fester until I could no longer contain them was a solid chunk of the reason I'd had to flee- I mean move to France, now would have to be as good a time as any to test out the landline.

Even if the car wasn't in still in the ditch, there was the old-person shaped dent I would have to figure out how to explain. Maybe some blood, teeth, and hair too. Whoops.

"Nah, dude, I was super upset. Distraught, you could even say. Akuma?" There was that word again. Was it a verb? Adjective? Were those distinctions still the same in French? Eh, all I knew was that I was going to take this and run with it for as long as the foreigner excuse could possibly last. "Yeah, I was about to Akuma all over the place. No, no, I talked myself out of it, but you wouldn't believe how difficult that was."

I kicked my feet up onto the coffee table and snatched the remote from the couch cushion beside me. Cooking, kids shows, news broadcast, a superhero show with a woman in a suit commentating over it? Odd, not sure why that made the news, but whatever. Let's see, next channel was por- whoa, the package I'd chosen included the adult stations? Huh, guess that's what happens when you buy something in a language you didn't until very recently understand. Or I did understand it without realising, and that was why I'd chosen it in the first place…?

"Well, I mean, it took some deep breathing exercises, but I was just _so_ angry with myself for swerving into that ditch." It occurred to me in that moment that I was contemplating language and the labyrinth of my own psyche while watching a young lady pay for her pizza via… shall we say, alternative methods. The saddest part was that I didn't think this was actually the first time this series of events had happened to me. What else was I going to consider, the plot? "What can I say, man? A runaway school bus full of puppies has that effect on people, I guess. If only I could have done more, those puppies wouldn't have exploded so hard that they became nothing more than mist."

Tragic, truly. What's that you say, 'the puppies or the fact that this is working'? Hmm, let's go with both for now.

Now where did I put that remote…?

"Tragic, truly. What's that you say, full refund?" I absently polished my nails on my shirt as the man on the other end of the line commiserated with my harrowing experience. "Thank you, thank you, that makes today feel a little better. What was that? Oh yes, it's parked right outside that building. You can't miss it, it's the one that's upside down."

…I was very enthusiastic to check out my new place. Shut up.

"Yes, I know, I know! A very big school bus, it was insane! Drivers these days don't know what they're doing!"

 _So_ the road rules were a little _different_ here, sue me! Actually, don't, a few other people probably already had that covered.

Well, so long as I didn't run over anybody who had _too much_ money, then it would be all good. Not that I ran over… that many… people…

Losing count is a good sign, right?

"Well, I have other things I must do now, so I wish you a good day." The scene on the television shifted, flickering and twisting away like the transitions of a PowerPoint presentation. It seemed to take the plot with it, as now the pizza boy was dressed as a plumber. Ma'am, I don't know how to tell you this, but I don't think he's qualified for this sort of work- aaaaand there goes his pants. "Yes, sir. Yep. Thank you for your time! Hahaha, indeed. Ba-bye."

I ended the call with a click, pulling the phone away from my ear so I could stare at it. Maybe I still was speaking a different language, because seriously? They believed that shit?

"What. An. Idiot."

Ahh, whatever. All the better for me in the end; having to burn through money quickly without making it look like I was doing anything suspicious left surprisingly little over in terms of funds. Sure, this place had been paid forward for a month, but I still needed to _eat._ 'Akuma' must have been some sort of insurance company or something, with a CEO that had way too much money and not enough ways to spend it.

Before I could ponder that any further, I heard a noise. It almost sounded like someone trying to smother a laugh by making it sound like a cough. A second later, it was followed up by three small taps, soft and yet audible over the T.V.

Someone was knocking on my door.

I shook my head, glancing around for the remote. The floor, nope. The couch, nope. The coffee table, nope. The tapping came again after about ten seconds, and with a shrug, I peeled myself off the couch. I suppose worse things could be blaring out of my surround sound system while meeting the neighbours for the first time, even if I could think of any in the moment. At least it wasn't overwhelmingly loud?

Well hey, it could be worse. For the moment, the woman had been gagging- I mean… For the moment, the woman no longer had the option to… speak her mind.

I reached the door just as the third set of taps were beginning, swinging it open perhaps a bit more aggressively than what was truly necessary. I could do this, I knew I could. It was just… _people._ I was a young, attractive man of 21, and I could totally hold one of those conversation things with that talk line that partway cut through the bottom of my head. Who cared if there wasn't a phone between me and the other human creature? I sure didn't!

I stared straight ahead, one hand still resting on the door handle. I then looked to the left, staring down the corridor for any trace of a person. There was nobody there, just as there wasn't anybody there when I glanced to the right. Damn kids and their practical jokes, of course those little shits would be universal-

Someone cleared their throat before I could close the door fully. By the sounds of it, they were _extremely_ close. My arm froze, holding the door in place as I _slowly_ looked down.

A very short, very familiar Asian man in a Hawaiian shirt was staring back up at me. He looked far too amused for my tastes, especially considering I could probably step on the entirety of him in one go if I tried hard enough.

"May I come in?" He asked, no pomp or circumstance. Just a regular old question that people ask.

I opened my mouth, to ask him who exactly he was and what he wanted and _oh shit he's here for revenge I knew I should have hit him harder,_ when _something_ chose that moment to interrupt me.

_"Ugh, yeah, clean my pipes! Yes! YES!"_

The cry echoed out around us and down the corridor. The classical music coming from the other end abruptly stopped, the door slamming shut a moment later.

Throughout it all, I refused to break eye contact, because that may just have been the only thing I had left.

"…I'd prefer we remained out here for a little while, personally."

The man's calm smile stretched just a little bit wider. The little fairy thing hovering right beside his head let out a small chuckle, looking me up and down appraisingly.

Yeah, laugh it up, you little bug looking freak. My hand's been known to slip in the past, if you catch my…

…Wait. What?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which little is revealed and everyone finally gets some names.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll start this off by saying hello, I am EXNativo. Krazy is a close friend of mine and I thank him for cross-posting the story here for people to read. The ML scene here is massive.
> 
> What you'll get from me is a lot of comedy and the odd accounts of angst. Also some course language, adult themes, and sexual references. PG13+, blah blah.
> 
> Also, I figure I may as well include a small picture of what Lukas will look like, all thing's considered. He is me, and I can't be bothered explaining him when I can just photograph him. I'll chuck it down below, once I figure out how. Very new to the site, and all that.
> 
> Oh, there we go.
> 
> Once again, cheers to Krazy. Hope y'all enjoy.

_Innit he gorgeous. Let's ruin him._

|

**XxX**

"This… is exceedingly difficult to believe."

My hand wasn't shaking as I swiped the bottle of rum off the table and downed about a quarter of it in one shot. No, if anything, it was deathly calm. My other hand, on the other… hand, was numb in its position, clamped around a newspaper hard enough to tear the pages.

It had been shaking a minute ago. Now, I could barely feel it. If I hadn't downed over a litre of rum already, I might have been somewhat worried.

"You'll never reach my age if you keep drinking that, you know."

In defiance of the old man tittering at me from my own couch, I upturned the bottle into my mouth and gulped down what was left of it in three swallows. I then flipped it back around and slammed it onto my table, hard enough to leave small cracks in the wooden surface. Oops.

"You know what, you're absolutely right." Pushing my chair out, I wobbled onto my feet, stumbling my way into the kitchen and flinging open the cabinet I'd set aside for all my booze related needs. Needless to say, it was both large and fully stocked. "I'm gonna need something way fucking heavier after finding out that not only do superheroes exist, but they've somehow been flinging yo-yos and shit in broad daylight without me noticing!"

The old man, who still hadn't had the common decency to tell me his name (instead opting to walk past me as though I didn't exist and dump a newspaper proclaiming the existence of magic onto my dining table), hummed distractedly. I turned around to face him just as the lady he was watching on my T.V- Gak!

"Oi, turn that shit off!"

"I cannot. The remote seems to be missing." The words were mournful. The tone and utter indifference in his actions were not. The little smartass then had the audacity to look at me with a raised eyebrow, as though his excursion here was all  _my_  fault. "However did you not notice Ladybug and Chat Noir's work in Paris? Their exploits are famous, even overseas."

Great, the rock I'd been hiding under up until this point was actually a boulder. That really made me feel good inside about living in a massive city that I'd never been to before.

All I could do was shrug at him, before turning to the second half of the possible meltdown I was currently experiencing. The turtle spirit was looking up at me with a small smile, in between sipping from a carton of vegetable juice that I had found in the back of my fridge. The straw it was using had more twists and turns than I would have pills left over after this was all said and done.

"Odd." Yeah, you're one to talk, you cockroach-lookin' fuckhead. The old man may have barged his way in first, but I hadn't invited you in either. It shifted forward slightly, pushing the straw out of its face to look me over with narrowed eyes. "You seem to lack any and all magic that a person should possess."

Unlike anything _I'd_  said, that seemed to spur the old man into action. He sprang to his feet, paused a moment to rub at his lower back, and then circled around my couch. I took a seat on one of the two bar stools lined along the outside of my kitchen counter, still towering over him even as I slouched and cracked the seal on my precious bottle of absinthe.

"So I won't get a letter for my eleventh birthday, heartbreaking." The packet of straws I'd opened for the fairy was still on the counter. Fishing one out, I stabbed it rather bitterly into the open neck of the bottle, pinching it near shut around the middle before bringing it to my mouth. Even if I planned on finishing it all in one day, I knew from experience how much alcohol poisoning sucked. "Now why the fuck are the two of you in my apartment again?"

"There is only one reason why someone would lack any magic at all." I yanked the straw out of the bottle before the words had even finished echoing and tipped it upside down. Fuck the poison, I wanted out. "You sensed it too, Wayzz?"

_Glug…glug…glug…_

Just had to… hold my breath a little bit longer… maybe that way I could make myself… pass out-!

What felt like a pair of handcuffs clamped down onto my wrist. I gasped at the sudden sensation, which had the unfortunate side effect of ejecting absinthe right back into the bottle. Through the opening that was nowhere near large enough to handle the flood I'd just tried to shove through it. Needless to say, for a few seconds, there was a localised green rainstorm in my kitchen. The old man didn't seem to mind all that much, apparently far too focused on holding onto my pulse like it was the kill-switch for enough TNT to level Paris.

I decided, in that moment, that I wasn't going to hold onto the bottle any longer. Not because I'd just lost a quarter of it to the tiled floor, or the fact that it was a bit too slippery to grip properly and would likely end up making even more of a mess when I inevitably dropped it. No, I pushed the bottle away from me, because right then and there, I was seriously considering smashing it against the counter like I was christening a new boat, and then shoving the largest shard of glass left over from the carnage down the old man's neck.

Damn it, I was not going to kill anybody while in Paris, even if it killed  _me!_

"He appears to still be alive, Master." The turtle-fairy-sprite, presumably Wayzz, hovered about my head. I flicked my hand at him instinctively, sending him twirling through the air around my kitchen. He made it a full lap and a half before he finally stopped spinning, doing a good impression of someone stumbling about drunkenly even if he was still in mid-air. "He appears to be angry, Master!"

The old man tugged at my arm, almost pulling me out of my seat completely. I fell sideways, catching myself awkwardly with one foot as he raised his free hand to my face. For a moment, I thought he was going to backhand the shit out of me, until he gently took a hold of my eyelid and stretched it as wide as it could go.

"Hmmm." He hummed, tilting his head this way and that. Before I could say anything, he let me go, turning to Wayzz as I tried desperately to rub away the feeling of someone else's fingers  _far_  to close to my eyeball. Seriously, did they  _not_  have personal space in whatever century he'd grown up in? "Perhaps he is only dead on the inside?"

"Alright, look. I've been remarkably patient up until this point. Y'know, for  _me._ " The woman on the television chose that moment to moan once more. I had already picked up my bottle and was halfway through the motion of throwing it through her face before my booze-addled brain caught up and stopped my arm. Seeing as I would have been looking at five digits in damages, that was probably for the best.

The old man hadn't taken a single step back when I surged to my feet. Looking down at him now, I don't think it would have been an exaggeration to say that I was at least twice his height. The look he was giving me was one that I couldn't quite explain. Even though I'd been the one to hit him with my car,  _I_  felt like the one who was caught in the headlights.

It shook me, more than I was happy to admit.

"If you would be so kind as to tell me what you fucking want from me, if anything, and then leave so that I can get back to my life, that would be  _swell._ "

Heedless of the fact that I had company and the fact that I was in an enclosed space, I stuck my hand in my pocket, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. People had always said that the habit would kill me sooner rather than later, but I'd never really felt like I was all that lucky.

The old man said nothing as I managed to light up with shaking hands and take an even shakier breath. Wayzz flittered out of my view for a second, though judging by the sounds of pedestrians and cars that were suddenly flooding my apartment, I could guess fairly accurately that he'd cracked a window. I waved at him when he came back into view, before sinking to the ground and sitting with my legs crossed and my head resting against the front of my counter. I'd taken the soaked bottle of absinthe with me on the way down.

At least the carpet on this side was comfortable. And clean, for however long that would last.

For a moment, all was silent, aside from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. My gaze drifted to the ceiling, counting the particles of dust in the air if only to stop myself from thinking.

A quiet grunt of effort got me to uncross my eyes. The refocused on the old man as he clambered down onto his knees in front of me, his cane laid out across his lap. He didn't look too uncomfortable, despite the position, which made me decide that it wouldn't really be my place to say anything to him about it. Wayzz drifted down and landed on his Master's shoulders, giving me a look of pity that didn't suit his face in the least.

I took another long drag of my cigarette, burning it a quarter of the way down to the filter in one go. Tilting my head to the side, I blew the smoke away from the old man's face as he cleared his throat, fixing me with another long stare.

"A long time ago, there was a man much like you." Well, there went my theory that there was nobody else quite like me in the world. I chuckled humourlessly and tipped the bottle back, keeping it as quiet as possibly so I could hear what was being said. "It was said that he lacked magic within himself, and so he decided to make enough magic for everybody else around him. Perhaps he was the one who was magical all along, but that answer has been lost to time."

He sent a look at the fairy on his shoulder, drawing my attention back to Wayzz along with him. Wayzz looked between the two of us, a bit helplessly if I was correct in my assumption, which made me a bit curious. Surely this wasn't the first time this had ever been brought up between the two of them?

After a moment, Wayzz's single antenna drooped ever so slightly. "I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I've forgotten which way around it was. But it's been a really long time since then, so much has happened in the world!"

"So, you're ageless, or something?" I said, without pausing to think. Seeing Wayzz's mouth open, I hastily tacked on, "Wait, no, don't answer, I don't want to know. Just keep talking, please."

I gestured at the old man with my bottle, which, looking back, may have come across as me offering him a drink. It would explain why he'd shaken his head and waved the bottle away with a tired looking smile.

"You young people, so impatient!" The old man chuckled under his breath, at what may have been his own joke, I couldn't tell. I wasn't feeling all that impatient in that moment; if anything, everything around me was finally slowing to a pace that I could manage. "That man came to be known as the Mage, and it was he who gave humanity and Kwami the ability to properly interact with one another. You share this characteristic with him, yet you were unaware of magic even existing at all…"

I got another long look after that one. It led to me trying to look as busy as possible, mainly by cracking the bottle open and taking a draught that was long enough to make me fear for the continued functionality of my diaphragm.

Damn it, it wasn't working, and I needed to breathe.

"Look man, I dunno what to tell you." A few embers landed on my pants as I waved the hand holding my cigarette carelessly. These pants were pretty much ruined anyway, old and frayed as they were, so a little more damage was hardly going to push them over the edge. "I just came to Paris for a fresh start, I wasn't expecting magic as soon as I stepped off the damn plane. I've never heard of any Ladybug or Chat Noir, I've got no idea what a Kwami is or how it would possibly have an impact on my life. Hell if I know what that Hawkmoth dickhead wanted from me earlier-"

The elderly gentleman on the floor with me straightened up so quickly that I was genuinely concerned he'd hurt himself with the movement. He'd even managed to dislodge Wayzz in that second, sending the poor turtle spinning through the air for the second time in what could have been as many minutes.

"You spoke to Hawkmoth?" Whoever-sama gave no indication of the multiple fractures that now resided in his spine. Then again, considering that I'd laid him out flat with a car earlier that same day, and he'd just gotten up afterwards and hobbled away like the five pieces his ribcage was now in meant no thang, I'm not too sure why I was even surprised. "When was this?"

…Shit, when had that happened? There had been so much that went down between then and now. I'd hit someone with a car, possibly married a goat, and did you hear that magic was apparently real and took the form of a yo-yo? Totally batshit crazy, dude, I'm telling you.

"Uhh, on my way into Paris, I think? Yeah, yeah, my car broke down, I got severely pissed off at life, then I saw a butterfly, and the next thing I know there's a neon sign slowly grilling my eyeballs to a fuckin' crisp." The utter lack of indication that I was going to get a response from either of them spurred me on to keep talking. "Uhh… He offered to fix my car, then told me to go fight Ladybug and Chat Noir. Which is kind of weird, now that I know what they are."

I flung my hand in the direction of where the newspaper had slipped to the ground. Absinthe splashed out of the bottle with the sudden movement. I was beginning to think that I'd maybe had a bit too much a bit too quickly.

Some of it got a little too close to the cigarette for comfort. Without much thought, I flicked the still smouldering stick upwards and slightly back, waiting a second before hearing the telltale  _dink_ of it landing perfectly in the sink. How that ended up working, I'll never know. My best guess was cartoon physics, or perhaps divine intervention.

"Seriously, they look like they're in their early teens. Anyway, I said no, he got annoyed, told me to go take their Miraculous', and then pissed off when I told him that I was just going to call a tow truck."

Even just remembering that conversation, I couldn't help but shrug. Knowing magic was involved made it a bit easier to write off, but it also made it far more difficult to explain. Such was the quandary of dealing with the supernatural, I suppose.

Colonel Sanders' ambiguously Asian cousin was staring at me. I was guessing that he was shocked, seeing as he didn't actually seem to have retained the capability of closing his mouth. It flapped uselessly a few times, almost in perfect unison with the gentle breeze blowing in through the open window.

"You… are unaffected by his abilities?"

"Eeh, if he can mind control like I'm thinking he can, then I'd say I'm more…" Thinking back on the unholy amounts of anger that I been feeling in those moments, I waved a hand around with far more force than I'd been going for, "…Heavily resistant. Why, is that important?"

I then proceeded to slap myself, once again, with far more force than I'd been going for. This time, I probably deserved it, because  _of course something like that would be important, fuckwit._  I could already hear how that must have sounded in their ears; Durr, Hockmoff tried to maik me do stuffs with mehgik and I did not what he wants, am me troubled?

_Idiot._

General Tso and his newest option on the menu looked at each other, twin expressions of alarm on their faces. "No, no, it is more influence…" They both blinked, very slowly and in very creepy accord with one another, before the old man grabbed Wayzz around the middle and sent me a smile so plastic it may as well have come with an exclusive dreamhouse. "Excuse us for a moment, please."

They then proceeded to rotate around. Wayzz was in the air and thus had an excuse for the movement, but after the old man flicked around while still on his knees like he was sitting on a spinning tile, I decided that I'd definitely had too much and that I would have to work on sobering up while I still fucking could.

Getting off the ground was a monumental challenge, but I faced it head on. By which I mean I pushed myself to my feet, turned around, stumbled over my own limbs, and damn near brained myself on the very stool that I'd been sitting on before. Largely unfazed with such a blatant betrayal, I danced the deadly dance of death around all the pointy edges of my counter, and slapped my fridge a few times to show it who was boss and totally not because I kept missing the handle.

Somehow, in the middle of all this, I ditched the absinthe. Fuck if I knew where it went, one second it was there and the next it was gone.

Eventually, I suppose the fridge took pity on me, and allowed me access to the sweet nutrients within. With all the grace of a three-legged rhinoceros, I reached in and grabbed a loaf of bread, along with the entirety of the crisper. Opening it only a little bit was out of my league at that moment, if you know what I mean.

The next step was to get a knife, which I managed to do with some level of competence. If you're wondering why I decided it would be a good idea to have something deadly in my hands in the state I was in, well, that would make two of us. Seriously, what the fuck was I thinking?

"You two want a sandwich?" I waited for either of them to acknowledge me… which they utterly failed to do. Shrugging to myself, I got to work shredding the shit out of some lettuce, all the while trying to be as quiet as possible so I could eavesdrop on their conversation.

It wasn't exactly like they were being quiet, after all. No quieter than me simultaneously trying desperately to stay on my feet while also not making any attempt to stay on my feet. Look, I can't be held accountable for the shit that Drunk Lukas does, the dude's a moron.

"Master, this is not a good idea, at all!"

"Wayzz, we cannot ignore a boon like this when it is sitting right in front of us."

Simultaneously, both their heads turned to look at me. I chose that moment to attempt to chop a tomato in half. The bloody thing slipped around the knife, rocketed off to the side, bounced off the wall like it was made out of rubber, and hit me right in the eye when I turned around to see what the fuck it was doing.

They shifted back around while I was busy figuring out if I would ever see again.

"Master, I may not sense much darkness within him, but I do not sense much light either! You're talking about putting him into an environment like that, surrounded by-!"

"There have only ever been eight people recorded that could resist Nooroo at all."

My finished sandwich dropped to the ground during a new wave of wooziness. I may as well have dropped my firstborn if the noise I made when it hit the tiles was any indication. Like a wounded howler monkey attempting to call down a meteor and trigger the second extinction event.

"Only two of them could resist the transformation in its entirety. I have already vowed that I would never be wrong again, my old friend, now I ask that you trust me once more."

All conversation had ceased, not that I'd been paying attention to it. My eyes were glued to the ruined sandwich, splattered at my feet in a gruesome vegetable massacre. Realistically, it had been some strips of extremely poorly shredded lettuce and a whole tomato between two pieces of bread. To my dumb drunk ass, it was the end of the world, and proof that life was no longer worth living.

I sank to my knees, bracing myself with both hands on either side of the thing that probably didn't even constitute a meal. The tomato must have burst when it hit the ground, as there was an ever-expanding red puddle originating from underneath the top piece of bread. A seed slowly slid over and tapped against my left index finger. I nearly burst into tears.

"Mr…?"

I glanced up, eyes clouded and bottom lip quivering. The old man's expression was fairly neutral, but in my raw emotive state, it was one of the most sympathising faces I'd ever seen. I stared up into the aether for a moment, until it registered in my sluggish and incredibly drugged brain that I'd been asked a question.

Immediately, my mood soured. Apparently, I'd been feeling elated up until this point, because even after losing my precious sandwich, I'd still make and drop a thousand of them before choosing to revisit  _those_  memories again.

"…Lukas." I dropped my head, and most of the theatrics, and pushed myself back up to my feet. The kitchen was an absolute mess, but Wayzz seemed to be steadily taking care of the leftover lettuce in his own time, so I figured I would just clean up after he'd already knocked himself out. Grabbing the much lighter crisper, I shoved it back into its position in the fridge, slamming the door on the only bit of work I would be doing until the headache began to abate. "Got no last name, so don't bother asking."

No amounts of sagely wisdom or indecipherable looks would be enough to drag that story out of me. Not this soon.

"Lukas, then. I am Fu, but everybody calls me Master Fu." Finally, a name to go with the face. Good to have now, before I slipped up and actually offended him. "What qualifications and skills do you have?"

"Skills…?" What was this, a job interview? Fuck, I was way too far gone to think about this sort of shit. "Uh… You probably wouldn't guess it, but I suppose I'm decent with talking to people."

I began to tick down on my fingers, mainly because I knew for a fact that one hand of them would be enough. "Let's see… I'm good with writing and cooking… uhhh…" Wait, he'd said qualifications too, hadn't he? "There's a psyche degree in there that I  _mostly_  earned? I say mostly because I took some of the classes, but had to bail before I could finish it all, and then forged the papers to give myself an easier time in the future and why am I telling you this?"

Well, shit. Time to get back behind the wheel and finish the job before he could snitch on me. Alcohol, you have betrayed me  _yet again._

Fu nodded, seemingly ignorant of how that last statement had ended. I just knew this would bite me in the ass one day, there was no doubt in my mind about that. "Do you have anywhere to go back to after whatever happens in Paris?"

I chuckled under my breath, losing my balance briefly and slamming a hand down onto my counter to regain it. Wayzz and the knife I'd been using both jumped. Across the room, the newspaper on the ground flipped a few pages in the breeze, eventually settling on a headline about dark butterflies and monsters that went bump in the boulevard.

Fu was still waiting for my answer, so I looked at him. I mean  _really_  looked at him, examining him from head to toe, with vested interest that I didn't typically reserve for people. He looked human, had all the fingers and toes that a human was supposed to have, but he also had a pet fairy and the knowledge of a functioning system of magic.

"To be honest with you, Master Fu… I doubt I'm even on the same planet anymore." I'd wanted a new start from Paris. This wasn't at all what I'd had in mind. "Besides, everyone I cared about is… gone. I'm pretty much just biding my time until I get to see them again."

Fu nodded his head, not looking all that surprised. I suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to vomit.

I had to claw my way across the counter to get to the sink, seeing as my legs had apparently decided to stop working. Yanking the plug out was a jerky enough motion to almost send me over the edge, my breaths shallow and stomach in riot.

Movement from the corner of my eye made me turn my head. Fu had climbed onto the stool that I'd been sitting on, resting his elbows on the counter and his chin atop a single thumb. His attention, sharp and piercing, no longer felt welcome. Now, the only comparison I had was…  _eerie._

"Have you ever considered giving your own life to save another?"

I blinked three times in quick succession, memories playing out behind my eyelids every single time. Flashing blue and red lights, the resigned faces of the only family I'd ever had, the pin from the only grenade I'd ever seen between my teeth, everything going fuzzy as something heavy slammed into the back of my head, the ground shaking as everyone screamed at one another, waking up much later with all the money from our final job, nothing but  _loneliness for the next five years-_

Alcohol surged back up my throat, painting my sink a neon green that seemed to glow in my eyes. It tasted like absinthe.

I had to brace myself against the counter, my hands gripping the sides of the sink like my life depended on it. My legs were shaking too much to hold my weight. I almost fell twice as I cleared my throat and spat the gunk into the rest of the mess I had made.

My throat burned. My teeth ached. My lips stung as they curled up at the corners.

"I guess I have, yeah." My reflection smiled up at me. It was murky, disgusting; still that same stupid kid that had nobody. The same prick who never wanted anybody in the first place. "I'm not exactly very good at it, though."

Something poked me in the shoulder. Too exhausted to even move my neck, I let the arm that had been tapped slump, locking my other elbow as my entire weight crashed onto it. Wayzz hovered there beside me, a half-filled bottle of water in his tiny hands. He was clearly struggling with the weight, if the strained smile on his face was anything to go by.

I forced my deadened arm to move, plucking the water bottle out of his grasp. The rest of me couldn't be convinced so easily, so I just stuck the cap in between my teeth and unscrewed it with them. It was painful, but I barely felt it. The tap creaked slightly as I turned it on full blast, swishing it back and forth with the end of my water bottle.

Master Fu kept watching me as I set the tap directly above the drain and washed my mouth out, spitting a third of the water into the sink in a fruitless attempt to wash away the taste. His cane tapped a staccato tune against the leg of the stool, the noise foreign amongst the ringing in my ears.

He was smiling.

"I believe you will be perfect."

I coughed weakly, wiping my mouth on the back of my sleeve as I glared at him tiredly through watering eyes. I was about two seconds away from passing out, and I had a feeling we both knew it. "Perfect for  _what?_ "

The last thing I saw before I slumped to the floor was him winking at me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will admit that I've not watched all of ML and read all the supplementary material. I am but trash that may have screwed canon over at any point in time. If anything comes to my attention as seriously wrong, I'll fix it, worry not. 
> 
> For now, thanks for reading.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plot train has no brakes.

I could hear Master Fu humming to himself when I woke up.

A ray of sunlight was the first thing I saw as soon as I opened my eyes. Letting out a pitiful moan, I closed them once again, pawing uselessly at the air in an attempt to knock it strange thought that it seemed to be working entered my head, and I didn't realise that I was just patting something gently on the head until it let out a sort of squeak.

I cracked open my bloodshot, aching eyes at the noise, catching sight of something green before it was lost to a haze of colours and water. It was flying and tiny, however, and even in my current state, I could remember what that meant.

"It was real…" I near silently bemoaned, lifting my head slightly off the ground and letting it fall back down. The back of my skull smacked painfully against the kitchen tiles. "...Ow."

"Please do not injure yourself!" Something cold slapped down over my eyes, blocking out the light. I could hear the tiny  _whoosh_  of displaced air as Wayzz rushed towards my bedroom, returning a moment later and dropping what felt like my pillow onto my stomach. "Master Fu can't treat you now, he's still too exhausted from getting all those poisons out of your body!"

"He didn't have to worry about me going on a bender, hardly the first time it's…" I took a deep breath, trying to stave off some of the pain in my head, before stopping dead in my tracks.

That breath… hadn't been uncomfortable.

I took another breath, even deeper than the first one, and held it. The pain I'd been expecting was nowhere to be found. My body didn't feel like it was slowly being torn apart at the seams with the movement. There was no burning in my chest with the simple movement, a sensation I'd managed to grow accustomed to by the time I turned seventeen.

Blowing out the breath, I shut my eyes even tighter, blocking out the last vestiges out light that could get through the towel on my face, and  _concentrated._  Aside from the ache coming from the back of my head and a headache that might have been blossoming into a migraine, I actually felt… good.

No, forget good, I felt fucking fantastic.

My throat didn't feel like I'd been chugging acid since the day I was born. The pit of my stomach didn't feel like someone had stabbed me and then forgotten about their knife for a few years. There was no random ache in one of my limbs that couldn't be explained and had a chance of disappearing before I even realised it was there.

For the first time in years, I felt  _alive._

And that, in and of itself, was perhaps the most suspicious part of this all.

"Wayzz." Pulling the towel off my face, I squinted through the harsh sunlight, looking towards the greenish blob that was floating a little ways out of my kitchen. Damn it, they must have taken my glasses off at some point, I'd need to find those later.

My fingers were twitching to reach for a cigarette. I brought my hand to my face to watch them move of their own volition, noting that they seemed to… hold less colour than I could remember. I'd always been extremely pale; even coming from a country as sun-kissed as Australia hadn't been enough to curb my tendency of staying inside as often as possible.

The nicotine stains were gone. I wasn't about to complain, but I was also totally about to complain.

"What do you mean, all those 'poisons'?"

For whatever fucked up reason, I felt like I could trust Fu. He'd trusted me, after all; sure, he'd come right up to my doorstep all, "hallo, my name iz Masta Fu, and zis in my fairy", but you didn't go up to random people and show them your fairy and oh lord this was starting to sound like a euphemism.

_Fuck. I'd been about to make a sarcastic comment about him being inside me._

Shit dude, maybe dying slowly of several poisons wouldn't have been too bad.  _Shit dude, maybe I should take these mental images and restart for a new world record._

"You were doing a very good job at slowly killing yourself." Wayzz floated back down in front of my face, little top-nubs crossed as far across his chest as they could go. I started to peel myself off the floor, slowly, waiting until he got the message and moved out of my way before picking myself up entirely. "Master Fu took that as a challenge, and he can be quite a stubborn man once he puts his mind to something."

I think I wanted to puke again. This time it was less due to the turmoil my stomach and surrounding areas were in, and more to do with the fact that the entirety of my insides were feeling to need to be projected outside of my body, so that they may become one with the universe, and leave the festering ball of mistakes that was out planet behind.

_Be free._

"And how did he do that, then? Magic?" I was far more steady on my feet than I had any right to be, hands clasped on the edge of the counter and head dipped down so that my hair would block the sunlight from my eyes. I would need to invest in some curtains, or some magical means of extinguishing the sun for only my apartment. Shit dude, it could happen. "I thought I was supposed to be immune to magic, or something like that."

"You have only shown resistance to Hawkmoth's ill intentions."

Ah, the man of the hour, in the flesh. I raised my head, replacing my curtain of hair with my spare hand, and sent a grimace towards the doorway of the spare bedroom. To be fair, I'd been trying to go for a smile, but mental images were powerful and I was weak.

Fu didn't seem to mind all that much, slowly tapping his cane against he ground as he made his way through my apartment. He was still wearing the same clothes as before, Hawaiian shirt and nondescript pants, and the complete bird's nest that was his hair gave me the impression that he'd just rolled out of bed.

Even as I thought that, he let out a jaw-cracking yawn, patting Wayzz gently on the head when he flitted over to greet him. He rubbed at his eyes with his other hand, climbing onto one of the bar stools with dexterity I wouldn't have expected someone of his height or age. "Until you meet Ladybug and Chat Noir, we may not be certain of where your capabilities end."

I raised an eyebrow at that, even if I kept my mouth shut. He'd said 'until', not 'unless'. Either he was planning on making me meet them, or he was confident that it would happen on its own. Truth be known, I wasn't too hot on either suggestion. I could happily live out the rest of my life without having to interact with crap like magic, but I suppose I always had been a bit of a pessimist.

Maybe it wouldn't be so ba- Nope, no, stop that. The last thing I needed to do was jinx myself.

"So…" I trailed off, glancing left and right for something, anything to talk about. My eyes drifted up, and- oh, hey, I found the absinthe bottle. I wasn't going to question how it had managed to get on top of the ceiling fan, but I'd found it.

Though speaking of…

"How bad was my damage?"

My vision swam for a moment as I tried to look down, before a sharp pain blossomed out across the back of my head. I stumbled into the counter with an indignant squawk, while Master Fu tapped his cane absently against his thigh.

The wooden  _thwack_ coming from that movement was identical to what I'd heard a nanosecond before I'd almost been laid out. Now, I'm not saying that Fu had moved faster than I could follow and damn near blew my brains out through my nose, but I was saying that he was rubbing his back with a wince and Wayzz was floating a small distance away, a look of concern on his face.

"You have no need to dwell on something like that. Your heart wished to keep living, even if your head had given up." Fu had that wizened teacher voice perfected, even down to the part where he was still cringing from the pain in his back. Damn, he was  _good._  "I thank you for the exercise, it is nice to know that I have still got it."

Smug little bastard. I rolled my eyes at the expression on his face and ducked my head into the cupboard at my knees, deciding against pushing it for the second time in as many minutes. Man, I must have been in a good mood today.

"Yeah, fine, whatever. I'll choose to believe you." Straightening up, I dragged a frying pan with me, using it to point at the duo that had seemingly decided to move into my house. Seriously, all Fu needed was a toothbrush and money for half the bills. If I came home one day to only half a fridge I was going to flip. "Now, what do you want me to do for you?"

Fu raised an eyebrow while Wayzz blinked, like neither of them knew what I was talking about. I shook my head and turned to the stove, talking to them over my shoulder as I set the pan down and flicked on the gas. Old-fashioned, but what was life without a little fire? "Don't fucking give me that look. I don't have the money to cover a freaky unicorn wish for health right now, and I don't like owing people favours. Just give me something to do and I can have it done."

Fu made a little noise of understanding as I abandoned the stove and flicked open my fridge. Damn it, no eggs or bacon or… why the fuck was the crisper upside-down?

_How_  the fuck was the crisper upside-down?

"I want you to accept the job I'm about to offer you."

I nodded to myself, abandoning the fridge and instead deciding to raid the pantry for what would hopefully turn up pancake batter. Strange man with mystical abilities and a supernatural spirit smaller than my palm invades my property after suffering from my hand? Makes sense, I wonder who he would need me to… magic away?

No, wait, silly me, that's fucking stupid.

But just to make sure...

"...I'm assuming that I'm way off the mark, but are you asking me to kill someone for you?" I almost felt like hitting myself across the face as I looked through the ingredients I had available to me. Riiight, France. How could I not remember what I'd stocked this place with? Had I been drunk while doing the shopping too? I mean, crepes were  _basically_  pancakes, so they were probably good too, but I'd never made them before.  
Ah, fuck it. First time for everything. If I'd managed my third major outing with some friends while wearing a ski mask that had one less hole in it than I really needed, then I could manage this.

A small thump, followed by some odd squeaking caught my attention. I paused my attempts to get the ridiculously tight lid off of the beginning of my breakfast, and chanced another glance back over at my unwanted guests.

Wayzz was rolling around on the counter, red-faced and laughing so hard that barely any noise was coming out. Master Fu, on the other hand, was looking at me like I was insane. Which, to be fair, maybe?

I don't fucking know, I'm not a psychologist.

"Because I'm not exactly comfortable doing that, but I do possibly have connections." Fu's head fell into a waiting hand. Probably due to the embarrassment that I'd seen through his so quickly. The suffering sigh that followed could have been avoided if he hadn't broken into my joint. Live and learn, buddy. "If they even still exist here."

I turned back to my cooking, preparing what needed to be prepared and setting up my battle station for the possibility of my life now being an anime and Master Fu being able to pack away about seven times his own weight in food. It was a vested interest at this point, seeing as Ladybugs and Black Cats were apparently the first and last defense against the horrific might of fucking Butterflies.

It was surprisingly silent after that. Fu and Wayzz were speaking in hushed tones, actually making the effort to remain quiet this time. I let them be, focused more on the flames in front of me, and relished my first moment in Paris of what felt like  _normalcy._ No talk of magic and superheroes, no clamping my teeth around a bottle or a cigarette. No emotions running high or sarcasm being thrown about like rice at a wedding.

Disgustingly domestic, in a way. Except for the floating turtle, that bit was still kind of odd.

Eventually, Fu cleared his throat. The noise itself felt like it was pointed in my direction, so I half-turned towards him, my hands and eyes still busy sorting through the various fruits I had at my disposal. Blueberries were necessary, because we were a civilised sort and we were going to fucking act like it, but I still needed to decide what would go well with them.

"Why would you presume that I wish someone dead?"

I honestly could have snorted in that moment. The fuck was he, some sort of saint?  _Everyone_  had someone that they hoped would one day drop dead, that's just how humanity worked. The main difference between the psychopaths and the comedians was their drive to follow through.

Still, that was a debate topic all of its own, and definitely not one that I felt like having over breakfast. During your fifth drink and looking to call some drunkard's mother a llama to his face? Absolutely. During French pancakes and cups of steaming coffee, brewed to perfection in the City of Love? Eeeehhh, harder sell.

"Because I have only ever truly known people while they are in my company, and usually the people within my company want someone dead?"

The best part about my deflection was that it wasn't untrue. I smiled, good memories flitting through my mind as I poked at a peach and tried to decide if it was still safe to eat.

I was going to go with a tentative  _yes._  But I was also going to make Wayzz eat it first, because if there was anybody in my life that I couldn't trust, it was myself.

Besides, if I managed to kill something magical, didn't that mean that I would gain its powers? Transfer of energy that can't be destroyed and all that? I suppose Hawkmoth had better start hoping that he wasn't edible, because I wasn't above taking a few bites and mutating people who got upset at me.

"You need new friends."

Right you are, Master Fu.

"...But  _do you-_ "

Now, I'm not entirely sure what happened in that moment. All I know is that I was turning around to face Master Fu, and before I had even made it halfway, he'd gestured towards me with his cane. There was a fair amount of distance between it and me; he would have needed another cane of the same length just to reach my head, and yet I felt a blow against the back of my skull all the same.

The noise I made was… interesting, to say the least.

It was only about eight in the morning, too early to take this abuse. How damn rude.

"I do not want you to kill someone!"

"Ow! Shit, dude! I was kidding, kinda." I stumbled forward with another wave of his cane. It was much lighter this time, and if I was reading his expression correctly, it seemed that he was a bit embarrassed. Maybe from the loss of control? Odd, he hadn't seemed overly controlled before now. "Oi, hey, careful! That's where my smart people things live!"

Master Fu laid his cane down. I'm not proud to admit that I flinched a little bit.

"No, I have looked within you, and your head is home to several dust bunnies and a goat whom claims to be your spouse."

I opened my mouth to retort, and then left it hanging when I realised I couldn't actually come up with anything to say in response. Instead, I turned back around, tending to our breakfast, all the while trying to not think about what I needed to do to get to Paris. Fuck me sideways, that had been an ugly goat.

"Yeah, screw it, I don't know how to argue against that. It's probably true." A stack of three plates hovered over to my side of the kitchen. I took them from a panting Wayzz, absently handing him one of the strawberries I'd had left over while I divided the crepes into three equal servings.

There was a ridiculous amount of food there, but better safe than sorry.

With a flourish, I borderline threw two of the plates against the counter, kicking the freezer open and swiping a tub of ice-cream before bringing my breakfast over to join them. Wayzz was already eating with his… hands? I had no clue what to call them, but he didn't look like he needed cutlery.

"So," I slid a knife and fork Fu's way, following it up with a spoon when he grabbed the tub of ice-cream. The presentation on the plate kind of looked like a mess, but Wayzz wasn't dead yet, so it was probably edible for humans.

I pierced a blueberry mercilessly, waving the fork in their direction before taking my first bite and speaking through the food, for no reason other than to be annoying.

"Talk me through this job."

**XxX**

"This is a very bad idea."

Master Fu glanced up at me as we walked side by side down the street, his arms crossed behind his back and his cane bobbing along with the movement. Wayzz had hidden himself away into one of Fu's pockets, taking along a handful of blueberries for the ride.

I'd been hearing him snoring since before we even left my place. And if Fu was sleeping through the night, that probably meant that Wayzz had been keeping an eye on me. I would have to remember to thank him, when I next saw him.

"Nonsense. You are qualified, are you not?"

"Somewhat.  _Somewhat qualified._ " I had to stoop down to grab the back of Fu's collar when I stopped at a crossing and he didn't. The man seemed frustratingly good at wandering into danger with little to no regard for himself. "Now, not only are you telling me to work with children, which is bad enough for me as is, you're asking me to  _get inside their heads_. There is so much that could go wrong with this!"

The light flickered over to green. Fu started walking along with the rest of the pedestrians around us. The grip I still had on the back of his collar assured that I would be dragged along.

"Seriously, I watched a movie one time where a guy did this exact premise, except he purposefully turned his classroom into a cult, and then accidentally made them all kill themselves!"

"Do not turn them into a cult, then," Fu responded, as if it was that easy. All I could do was groan, resigned to the fact that there was no way to change an elderly person's mind about anything, and resume shitting myself at the monumental fuck-up this was absolutely going to end up being.

Fu had explained what he wanted of me, as per my request. It turned out that I actually lived on the same street as a school, and in that school was a particular class of students. Now, this particular class of students was special, because apparently they had all been  _targeted by some magical terrorist and turned into horrible monsters **hellbent on carrying out the world-domineering plans of SAID TERRORIST.**_

Crazy, right? Downright bizarre. Who'd have fucking thunk it-

Oh, and they also had no memory of what they did while they were brainwashed. Because hey, this shit wasn't horrifying enough already. Maybe they'd killed someone before they were brought back. Maybe that person had been brought back to life by Ladybug _(because she could do that and I fucking refuse to think about the logistics of such a thing)_. Maybe they'd killed someone and then tried to attack the only person who could possibly help. I didn't know, and neither did they, but they could think about it all they wanted to at night. When they were trying to sleep. By the way, get your ass to school in the morning, back to the place that made you upset enough to turn evil.

Fucking. What.

Fu had given me a report on what he needed of me. I didn't ask where he got it from, and he didn't tell me. All I knew was that Hawkmoth had mutated all but two students of a class, and they would have to be my top priority while I was there.

Because being able to tell some dickhead butterfly to hit the road was good enough to try to walk traumatised children through the horror they'd had forced upon them.

_APPARENTLY._

Fu had taken the professional-looking folder from me as soon as I'd finished reading. Something told me that I wasn't going to be seeing it against any time soon.

I  _had_ asked him how the fuck he'd managed to secure me this position. Seriously, working with minors was a crapshoot in general, but taking on a job with this much authority over them? Shit could and would go wrong in a heartbeat if everyone involved wasn't careful. Master Fu had understood that entirely and taken the time to reassure me that he was doing all this for a concrete reason and knew precisely how it would all go, because he was awesome like that.

"I have connections."

He'd then winked at me.

Needless to say, I still had my concerns.

Honestly, I'd kind of been hoping that Fu would give me superpowers. I mean, fuck, running around at night in a costume and punching magical baddies would have been less stressful than this.

The worst part was that Fu seemed convinced that I could do it, which would just make the failure sting even worse. That would be like disappointing your grandmother.

Wayzz was obviously the grandfather in this scenario.

I'd just stepped off the plane and already, Granddad was guilt-tripping me into cuddling a land mine. Now, I'm not saying that this was the most amount of bullshit I'd ever had to deal with in a comparative time, but come the fuck on, dude.

We had to step around a limousine that had parked over the top of the pedestrian crossing, right in the middle of the school. Bit of an odd place to put it, really, but so long as I was focusing on that, I didn't need to look up and see the school-

"We have arrived."

_Don't look at the building out of sight out of mind don't look at the building-_

I glanced up, right at the sign that was happily displaying the fact that we were about to enter Collège Françoise Dupont.

_Oh I looked!_

"Damn it, I can already see the cultists…" I heaved a deep breath, and squared my shoulders. Doing so had the unfortunate side-effect of making my shirt bunch up, because it was a piece of shit that I'd worn literally once before and then never again.

Fu had told me to dress in my best. My best consisted of a shirt with buttons and a pair of jeans, along with a beanie that I'd angled to let my fringe stick up from the top. It wasn't as cold as yesterday, but it was enough to make me appreciate my long sleeves. And long sleeves were the work of someone who hates humanity. True story, it checks out, I did the research myself by coming to my own conclusions. It counts, totally.

Hell, I was even wearing a tie. Granted, it was purple, had pink Eiffel Towers dotted all around it, and I'd bought it from a gift shop in the airport because I could, but that was as formal as I was comfortable with being.

I took three steps forward, before pausing on the forth. Something was off. I wasn't feeling confused and questioning why I'd ever been born!

I spun around, and sure enough, Master Fu was nowhere to be seen. Refraining from cursing him back to whatever generation just so happened to form a second cell only because I was currently surrounded by children, I looked left and right. I'd had my eyes off him for five seconds, tops, no way in Hell he'd managed to move that quickly without alerting  _someone._

I rotated in place, doing my best to see absolutely everything around me. Try as I might, I couldn't see him anywhere, and there was nobody around looking in any particular direction like an old man and his Hawaiian shirt had torn ass and dove behind a conveniently placed dumpster.

A piece of paper smacked me across the face, just as I'd completed my full rotation and was looking out into the street again. It fluttered in the breeze, smacking me a few more times across the face, and I crossed my eyes, trying to read what was printed on it.

It was a stupid idea for a stupid person, thus why I tried it.

Spluttering as a corner of the note almost went down my throat, I pulled the paper away from my face, and leveled a glare at a kid with a red jumper and shark fin of bleached hair. Little bastard had the audacity to laugh at me.

He looked oddly familiar, like I'd seen his face recently.

He snapped his mouth shut, turned his head to the ground, and started walking into the building a little faster. Hopefully that was one less little cocky shit to deal with. With that out of the way, I took another look at the note- and ended up having to do a double-take.

_' **Hawkmoth may never know where I am at any time'**_ , was what had been written across the top. That was somewhat badass and cryptic in and of itself, which made it all the more devastating when the sketch of Master Fu and Wayzz both giving me a thumbs up destroyed the image.

' ** _We believe in you!_** '

I shook my head, and moved to crumple the paper up. Before I could manage to do any damage to it, I changed my mind, instead folding it up and slipping it into my pocket. That done, I rolled my shoulders against the protests of my bullshit tight shirt, and climbed the stairs into the school.

**XxX**

Already, I was lost.

I wouldn't have been able to tell you if it was right in the doors or if it was a day's trek through the freezing cold tundra, but somehow, I had found myself on a basketball court. I looked over my shoulder to make sure I hadn't just stepped through the gates of Hell, and yep, there were the front doors.

... _Interesting design._

Both sides of the wall were covered in what I could only assume to be classrooms, given the numerous students all sitting in desks. Seems I'd arrived a bit after the bell, the rooms were all filled and the only few people not making their way towards one of them was a small group near the middle of the courtyard.

One kid was on his hands and knees, desperately attempting to salvage what looked like a model of the universe. From the distance I was standing, I could see a large yellow ball, surrounded by Mercury and Jupiter. All the other planets, along with a selection of other celestial bodies, were either rolling along the ground or shattered.

He'd made them out of  _glass_? Damn, that must have been heartbreaking.

The only other two people in the courtyard were by his side. I could hear them apologising for not looking where they were going. They were probably in the same class, taking out the opposition. Clever.

Well, maybe not, seeing as they were both head and shoulders over the dude on the ground. He was  _tiny._  As in smaller than Fu tiny. I didn't know that was possible.

Ah well, not my problem. I needed to get set up first before I could start butting in on people's lives. Which meant I would have to find the principal and butt in on his life, at least for a little while.

Now, just to find his office. Or her office. Didn't really matter to me, I'd gone to schools in the past with both men and women in charge, and they'd all been equally awful. The people, not the schools. Though the schools hadn't been that good either.

Anyway.

Boy gee whizz, It sure looked like a jail in here. What with the layout, you could take the windows and doors off and replace them with bars, and you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Well, if you took the door and windows away from  _anything_ , and added bars in their place, then that would probably look an awful lot like a cell as well. Even so, the architecture of this place was no help to the general teenage criticism that school was a prison.

My idle musings, and mental image of chains and orange jumpsuits, were interrupted when something caught my eye, a streak of darkness against the light blue and gray of the sky. I had to look up and squint through the sunlight, but- yep, that was a butterfly. A very dark butterfly that was moving faster than I'd ever seen a butterfly move, directly towards the kid on the ground.

Had he used some sort of flower in his display as well? Damn, all that work down the shitter in one second, that had to blow.

The others had left him there, I suppose to brood over his failed project. Having a strange man come up and no doubt awkwardly strike up a conversation probably wouldn't be any help, not without some context that I didn't yet have. I turned away to give him some privacy (I wouldn't want some dipshit goggling at me while I was busy trying to calculate just how fucked I was), and headed towards the closest classroom door.

Hopefully the teacher wouldn't mind too much if I interrupted the class for a moment. Really, opening out into a courtyard? Where were the offices? Where was the little stand off to the side to offer you a map?

Horrible architecture. It was bad because I didn't understand it. Trust me, I'm complaining.

I got about halfway to the door before I felt a chill go down my spine. It wasn't from the cold, that had so far been manageable. No, this felt more like… electricity. It tingled in my bones, permeating the air around me, giving off an ethereal glow. Almost like...

...Magic.

I could have placed my head in a door frame and slammed the handle into my eyeball a thousand times. Upset person, dark butterfly, in what was apparently the hotspot for magical occurrences on this side of the wardrobe? How the honest fuck had I forgotten about this shit  _already?_

I doubled my lethargic pace to an energetic power-walk, and chanced a glance over my shoulder when the energy in the air grew even more oppressive. The kid was sitting up now, a sinister smile almost curving around the neon butterfly on his face, while his clothes…

Alright, that was far too much spandex on a child. Hawkmoth already had a lot of things to answer for, but what the fuck man, come on.

I turned around, actually sliding on my heels a little with my abrupt stop. Any later and I would have walked directly into the door. Tapping the knuckle of my index finger against it twice, I pushed it open without waiting for a reply, a strained smile plastered across my face as every eye in the room swept over to me.

"Hi there," I said to the beautiful redhead that was standing in front of the teacher's desk. If I wasn't mistaken, I'd barged in while she had been taking roll-call. She was staring at me with a raised eyebrow, and it took me a second to realise that I was still speaking English.

I must have defaulted back to it when I woke up. Which meant that Fu and Wayzz had been indulging me all morning, without me even realising it.

Oops.

"Hi there," I tried again, switching to the French with the seamlessness of a native speaker. What else had Hawkmoth left in my mind, I had to wonder? "Sorry for interrupting, but I'm new to the area. Is there any protocol for when butterflies attack?"

"I AM INTERSTELLAR!" A crackling, pre-pubescent voice roared from the other side of the door before anyone else could talk. I think if Red's eyes didn't widen in abject terror, I may have giggled until I ran out of air. As it stood, I could only step into the classroom, my smile getting more and more forced with each passing second.

"IF PEOPLE DON'T RESPECT SPACE, THEN I'LL  ** _MAKE THEM!_** " The kid's voice must have risen two octaves at the end of that sentence. I perfectly masked my snort of laughter with a cough, turning away from Red as I did so.

I chose instead to look out over the classroom of kids that seemed frozen to their seats, and I recognised every single one of them. It took longer for some than it did for others, but as I glanced between them all, I could put a name to all the faces that I'd seen in print, earlier than morning.

There had been a few pictures missing, because of course there had been. Juleka's file had mentioned something about a curse, while Marinette's and Adrien's hadn't even had that for an excuse. All the others had given me something to work with though, and that was enough for me to feel a little indignant.

I'd managed to stumble across Hawkmoth's favourite group of victims while attempting to get out of the way of another. It was that sort of dramatic irony that convinced me the universe hated me.

All of them were in the midst of a panic, aside from three. Alya (if I was remembering correctly), seemed fairly excited at the prospect. Adrenaline junkie or suicidal, most likely. She was checking over her phone, tapping away at the screen with enough tenacity that she didn't even seem to notice the girl right beside her had bent over, and was now talking to her bag.

Almost as if she could feel my eyes on her, the girl's head snapped up and around to me. I would have been surprised if she hadn't hurt anything by doing that. She stared at me, with eyes that I could have sworn that I'd seen somewhere before, her hair bouncing with the sudden movement…

Someone could have punched me in the gut in that moment, and I probably wouldn't have felt it. Someone could have punched me in the balls when I saw her handbag move on its own accord, the barest hint of a spotted red head poking out the top, and I could have brushed them off entirely.

Because I'd seen that face. I'd seen it in the newspaper, behind a mask, bumping fists with her cat themed partner after the success of another battle.

She must have noticed, because her face went pale, her jaw hanging slightly with horror. An antenna came poking out of the bag, and when that didn't get the girl's attention, a single eye slid over the top to stare at me.

The eye then widened to an impossible degree, before flopping back into the bag.  
I think it also meowed at me, but I couldn't be sure.

That was the same sort of creature as Wayzz. Except Wayzz was a turtle, and this was a very iconic,  _incredibly_   _recognisable_ insect.

I was staring at Ladybug.  _Civilian_ Ladybug. Civilian Ladybug was staring at me like I was an incoming boulder. Civilian Ladybug was sitting behind a school desk.

I figured she would be young, but Civilian Ladybug was a  _kid_.

_You've got to be shitting the fuck out of me._


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holding out for a hero.

My blank stare only came to an end when the door behind me, along with a large majority of the rest of the wall, just up and disappeared. I only really noticed because I saw it happen out the corner of my eye, which was very odd, considering I could still feel the door handle in my grasp.

Trying to unclench my hand was pointless, the muscles didn't seem to be listening to me. My brain was telling me that I couldn't remain out in the open, my fingers were telling me "nah bro", and my arm was telling me "ow". I decided to listen to my brain, first time for everything, and wrenched my arm around hard enough to hear something near the elbow click.

It did the trick, however, dragging my hand around and away from the wall. It felt like I was moving it through tar, entirely annoying and no pain, which translated into an irritated scowl as I inspected the bank space where my hand had once been.

"…Ah."

Morbidly curious and suddenly running higher on adrenaline than what could have possibly been safe, I gripped my wrist with my remaining hand and forced it to flip over- and yes, that was indeed all the internal bits staring right back up at me, acting all innocent even though they were never supposed to see the light of day.

Thankfully, nothing squirted me in the face. That would have been a bit much, had it happened. That didn't change the fact that I was now  _missing a fucking hand._

A sharp gasp made me look back up. It seemed that everybody in the room was staring at me, up to and including at least two phones. Letting my useless arm flop back against my side, I undid my tie, taking a breath that was just this side of exaggerated before clamping my teeth around it.

"'M Lukesh." I waved the arm that didn't have a hand, before realising what I was doing. The tie went around the stump, taking the gooey bits out of view and leaving the strangest fucking sensation of my life behind. I wasn't bleeding, but I could still very much feel the door handle in my grasp. The door handle that no longer seemed to exist, embedded in the door that also did not exist, set in a doorframe that  _also_  also didn't exist, connected to a wall that  _also also also_ \- you get the point.

Mouth now free, I offered them all a grin. It didn't seem to help all that much, especially when set to the soundtrack of shrill cackling. "I'm the new, and by the sounds of it,  _only_  school councillor. I haven't even started yet. I've been in the school for literally two minutes."

I turned my strained smile towards the teacher. "Please tell me it's not always fucking like this."

Her expression was basically a mirror of mine. Some of the tension had left her, which pretty much indicated that yes, it was always fucking like this.

"Please don't swear in my classroom."

I could already tell we were going to get along poorly- was that screaming?

I whirled around, taking a few steps backwards while pushing my glasses back up my nose. God damn it, me, flirt later, there was a supervillain right outside. Priorities, fuck.

_Well sorry me, I didn't realise I was supposed to wrap my head around magic five seconds after seeing it in action!_

Aaand I hadn't taken my meds recently. Shit.

Alright, no, focus.  _Fucking focus_. I didn't have time to space out (fuck you Hawkmoth, I refused to feel ashamed for that), there was a hostile blocking the only exit, and children involved. Considering the one holding the metaphorical gun was their age, I had my doubts that he would choose not to shoot. Oh, and one of the hostages was an undercover superhero. If the way she'd looked at me and the abundance of comics books I'd bought with my shares could tell me anything, it was that transforming in front of witnesses would be a last ditch choice, which meant the rampage would continue unchecked.

Until Chat Noir decided to kick his ass into gear and turn up. Whether there would be a school left over by that point was debatable.

I'd run and kept up with a crew of professionals when I was fourteen fucking years old, damn it. It hadn't exactly been escaping school in the traditional sense, but screw it all if I hadn't had my own share of compartments that I'd had to wriggle my dumb ass out of. The first step would be figuring out just what the fuck I was up against.

Fucking hell. I came to France to get  _away_  from this bullshit.

The students in the room were beginning to clamour, glancing out of the windows that remained and jumping out of their seats. Some, I'm assuming the smart ones, were crouching underneath their desks and doing their best to not make a sound. The others were either hopping from foot to foot, looking around desperately for an exit, or filming on their phones- are you fucking kidding me.

They were making noise. Too much noise. Noise wasn't soothing; to someone who was operating entirely on hostility, noise was almost universally aggressive. Panic was all well and good, but when you had a barrel or a knife pointed at you, panicking lead to stupidity. Stupidity lead to death, and death was the end of the line.

I dragged myself to the edge of where the wall had been cut off, and kicked it. Hard. The thud hurt my foot like hell, but it got all eyes to me, and that was what I needed in that moment.

I motioned them down with my remaining hand, and peeked around the opening in the wall. What I saw was a kid wearing a bulky helmet and far too form fitting attire, riding a comet like some high budget Whole New World bullshit, veering down sharply towards a group of people. They were all small in stature  _– students –_  charging for the entrance of the school like the devil himself was on their heels.

What's-his-fuck, Interstellar or whatever, swooped low and reached out with one hand. A dull white glow surrounded it before he tapped the person at the back of the group on the shoulder, and the small girl only had enough time to widen her eyes before she was just… gone. Her, and a large chunk of the ground where she had been standing, vanished without a trace.

The crater was large enough to trip up her procession, and within the blink of an eye they were all gone too – along with most of the basketball court. Interstellar cackled again, placing one hand against the ground and the other against the wall of the classroom he was beside. Both began to blink out of existence as he flew forward, completing a few laps around the court in less time than it would have taken me to climb the stairs.

It didn't look like he could take that much at any given time, but he was also moving fast enough for that to not be a problem.

I had to jump back and roll underneath the teacher's desk when it occurred to me that my cover was about to fucking poof out of existence. I kicked the chair a little out of place as I went, but nobody seemed to notice, not even when I crawled on my forearms back into the open and nudged it further.

It looked like he was sitting pretty for the moment, content to just dig deeper and deeper. It was almost like he was trying to create a crater as quickly as he could, because… because…

"…Can Chat Noir or Ladybug fly?" I hissed at the room, trying to keep my voice low despite timing it so the evil child was on the other side of the court. Most had heeded my advice, but little miss phone still had her eyes and hand poking out from over her desk. She shook her head in answer, and I had to plant my face into the floor to smother my groan.

If my almost-certainly true theory was correct, then Ladybug was pinned down and wouldn't be able to help until she got her ass out of the classroom. A prospect that was rapidly becoming more and more impossible. The drop wasn't too far down, a meter at most, but once someone decided to leap into that pit, there was still the issue of leaping back out. And if there was no ground to manoeuvre on, and no options while in the air…

Why could Hawkmoth infect  _nerds?_  This was bullshit and unfair. He was somehow making me hate someone who had offered me roadside assistance. That was the highest order of shenanigans and I did not appreciate it.

Come on,  _think_. It was only my second day in the city, and I'd spent a large majority of the first either in a drunken haze, or unconscious. I would very much appreciate not kicking the bucket because some shithead kid couldn't look where the fuck they were going.

Fuck, what would Master Fu say in this situation?

_"You do not need powers to be a hero, you need only act."_

…Oh no. See, if I decided to compare and contrast with what my old leader would have said;

_"I mean, can you solve the problem by punching it?"_

…I may have just come up with a plan.

The explosion from this fuck-up was going to be visible from orbit, I could already tell.

**XxX**

The kid who got butterflied was absolutely tiny.

That wasn't just me being insulting, for once. Granted, I was a tall prick, but the kid would have been about half my height, no more. Add in the fact that he'd looked like he weighed less than a newborn kitten, and my reintroduction to school was primed and ready to be stereotypical as a motherfucker.

If I had a locker on hand, this would have been even better, but alas, sometimes we had to go without the things in life we crave the most.

Granted, I was going entirely off the assumption that the people who were made into freaks of nature had some sort of padding against damage. It would be somewhat hopeless otherwise, and the battles that happened in the city every other day would be about as entertaining to watch as two cosplayers going at one another with foam swords. 'Boring' and 'magic' were polar opposites, after all, it wouldn't make sense for one to exist alongside the other.

Really, the only person in danger when this inevitably went tits up would be me. That could be my retribution, for not jumping on the kid and taking the butterfly in the left shoulder blade or something. Long story short, I was going to attack a brainwashed child.

In case you were wondering, yes, I did feel like a big strong man.

Whatever, the news had said that Ladybug could fix some serious shit with whatever it was that she did. I had to read that in the paper, because my remote was still lost and T.V still… occupied. That apparently went up to and including lives that had been lost in the attacks. And let me tell you, I didn't let myself read those testimonies, but I had the strangest feeling that they would be able to tell you some shit.

The first part of my plan was simple. I wiggled my way out of my hiding place with all the grace of an earthworm, waiting for the kid and his pet rock to make another pass before somersaulting backwards. The movement was ridiculously easy, even though I probably wouldn't have been able to pull it off before today. Fu was a miracle worker, of this I had no doubts.

My little routine almost landed me directly into Red's lap. She was crouched behind the side of the desk, her clipboard still clutched to her chest. I had to applaud and question her dedication in the same breath.

I looked up at her, splayed out across the ground like I'd just been hit by a car, with my head almost in her lap. The very picture of cool confidence. Some colour had returned to her face, but as she stared down at me, I couldn't quite stretch that into her feeling good about this situation. I was getting kind of amped, honestly, which probably said a lot of not-very-good things about me.

Ah well. I could be excited enough for both of us.

I waved my arm at her, doing my best to silently get her attention. Because the one hand I had left was busy keeping me propped up, I had to use the one that was missing. Slapping her across the face with a trailing tie most likely did not help me in any way.

"How quickly can you get your students out?"

She removed the end of my tie from her nose with a splutter, flinging it back towards me with more force than was strictly necessary. "What are you talking about?"

Hmm, what was on the top of her desk that I could use? Book, nice and thick and definitely good for something. Computer, probably not. Pen…  _pen._

"I'm going to go do something very stupid." I rolled the pen between my fingers a little bit. It looked expensive and was heavier than anything that I had ever used, but so long as it could reach where I needed it to reach, it would work. "I need you to hustle your students out of here as quietly and quickly as possible, as soon as I move. Can you do that?"

Our conversation had drawn the attention of the rest of the room. Not hard to eavesdrop when the only other thing to listen to was the maniacal laughter of a current-madman. Many of them were staring at me like  _I_ was the crazy one in this situation. Which, I mean, point.

All I could do was shrug, and spin the pen around in the palm of my hand.

"I'm very good at distracting people."

I didn't bother seeing what they had to say to that one. Instead, I army-crawled my way back around the desk, continuing on until I was about halfway between the first bit of cover that I had and the opening to the courtyard.

Interstellar was all the was on the other side, completing another loop. He seemed to be leaving the middle mostly untouched, instead carving out a large trench around it. I had no idea why, and I wasn't about to stop and ask him.

He swerved back around the bend, out of my sight. Counting underneath my breath, I balanced myself on my knees, took one more deep breath, and hoped against hope that I was as good at this as I thought I was.

The pen was more weighted to one end, so giving it spin wouldn't be the best idea. It was small enough that even the wind coming off the comet would be able to knock it off course. If I didn't get out of the way in time, then I would ask to borrow someone's phone and pre-order a suitcase in my name. Just so they'd have somewhere to put what was left of me in the end.

Thank fuck I'd chosen to close the door with my left hand, the only thing I could throw with Ol' Leftie was a fucking tantrum.

I hit three, and let my arm snap out. Interstellar had just emerged from what was left of the wall as I threw myself at the ground like I was trying to break through it and into hell. He didn't seem to notice me, and I launched myself to my feet as soon as his back was turned, using what must have been less than two seconds to take a running leap back over the desk.

I saw the pen hit the kid's helmet right as I hit the floorboards. It bounced off almost delicately, which was all I needed to see before I flung myself around the desk chair and tucked my legs up to my chest. His head had been whipping around as I moved, and I could only pray that I'd managed to sequester myself back underneath the desk before he'd spotted me.

Holding my breath, my hand over my mouth, I strained my ears to hear over the rushing of my own blood in my veins. I counted out three heartbeats before something cluttered to the ground outside, some long ways away. I would hazard a guess as to say that it had been on the other side of the courtyard.

Holy shit. It hadn't disappeared.

_It hadn't disappeared._

This plan could work.

I chanced another glance out from behind the desk, and it was all I could do to not let all the adrenaline in my body stretch my lips into a crazed grin. Interstellar had slowed right down, and was now slowly patrolling around inside of the trench he'd made. He was staring up into the classrooms, no doubt looking for the person that had thrown something at him.

He was still below, with only his head poking out of the space that he had created, and he'd just stopped being such a hard target to hit.

Interstellar moved out of view, disappearing back around what was left of the wall. By this point, nothing on that side remained, apart from the supports holding up the walkway above us. With them were the walls separating each classroom, which was what I rolled over to and stood up against, flattening myself against it as much as possible.

"Someone give me a mirror, right the fuck now." I hissed out through my teeth. At first, I didn't think any of them had heard me, until the blond boy that was sitting in the front row reached into his bag and pulled out a compact. With a flick of his wrist, he launched it towards me. Every single movement he made was ridiculously graceful.

I caught it, nodded towards him in thanks, and briefly wondered why he looked familiar. It probably would have hit me a lot sooner if I had the time to actually stop and ponder, but all I could do was slide the compact into my pocket and grab the chair from behind Red's desk.

That done, I turned to the class, catching any eye that I could from their hiding places.

"As soon as I move, you all get the fuck out of here as quickly as you can." I slid with my back against the wall, the chair making far too much noise in the silence. There was a gap of about half a metre between the end of the wall and the drop, with the drop looking to now be deep enough to definitely hurt. I could only hope that the bigger kids would stick around the help out the smaller ones, or, barring that, magic could fix anything that went awry.

Movement caught my eye. I glanced over my shoulder as Red climbed to her feet, her expression twisted. It could have been a combination of any number of emotions, but good luck identifying them all.

"We're supposed to wait for Ladybug and Chat Noir!" Murmurs of agreement rose from the students. Interestingly enough, the boy that had given me the mirror looked just as guilty as the girl with the fairy-  _oh you have got to be kidding me._  "Are you insane!?"

I would be having words with Fu when this was all over. Very hostile and angry words.

Chair in position, I pulled out the mirror, flicking it open and inching it around the corner. It took me a moment to find the ridiculous helmet that was Interstellar, drifting slowly along the furthest wall. Despite the costume, and him needing a forklift if he wanted to look me in the eyes, the mere movement was actually fairly intimidating. And I would be actively provoking him, for the sake of people that I'd literally never met.

Maybe this idea wasn't great.

_Nah bro, this is a good idea._

Well, at least the voices in my head were on my side.

"Let's just say that I reflect the world around me."

Almost before I'd finished talking, someone screamed. I almost dropped the mirror with how sudden it was, but the streak of light now inhabiting the space that I'd been looking at told me everything I needed to know. Poking my head out as far as I dared to go, I saw a girl stumbling along across the bottom of the ditch, and Interstellar right behind her, his hand outstretched.

Originally, I'd been planning on using the glare from the mirror to blind him, just to make sure that he wouldn't be able to see me coming. As the girl ran past where I was standing, scratches showing through her legs and tears running down her face, I clicked the compact shut and tossed it in the direction that I figured the blond kid would still be sitting.

I gripped the arm of the chair, lifted it off the ground, and hurled it with all the force I could muster with a single arm. That proved to be quite a large amount, seeing as it managed to knock Interstellar completely off his comet when he appeared around the side of the wall and it hit him in the side of the head. He went flying ass over teakettle into his own ditch, his comet stopped dead in its tracks and his momentum carrying him a fair distance.

I heard many a choked gasp as I backed up a few steps, and someone actually screamed when I broke out into a dead sprint.

"MOVE!"

I followed the chair out of the hole, yanking the tie off my stump with my teeth as I did so.

**XxX**

You may be wondering why I decided to jump onto a magically amped preteen, two days after arriving in a new city.

There were any number of reasons for that one, actually. My self-preservation instincts had always been pretty shit, there was never a bad reason to punch a kid in the face, I wanted to feel alive. Take your pick. I had very little training and no real means of ensuring that anything I could do would actually mean anything, and was more likely to break something than actually be any help in this scenario.

At the same time, what could I really do? Hide, cower, and hope against hope that Ladybug actually didn't have a paper-thin disguise and was really rushing to the scene as quickly as she could? Oh, and Chat Noir would be with her, because Fu's sense of humour wasn't utter shit and liable to get someone killed? Yeah, no.

And here I was, thinking the man was a responsible adult.

I realised about halfway between the classroom and the ground that my observation could come across as incredibly hypocritical, but by that point I was already landing on the stationary comet, and I didn't have the time or the patience to bitch out myself right then. My job was distraction, and I couldn't distract someone else if my own brain was running me around in circles.

So instead, thinking could take the back seat for a little while. Interstellar was pushing himself bac to his feet, which was my cue to leap off the comet while in a pose that I had practiced many times in front of the mirror as a child. It was the all-time classic; 'I can't even pretend to know what I'm doing'. Complete with flailing arms and an adversary that was further out of my league than the teacher I'd left behind in that classroom.

That may have been me mixing metaphors. Thankfully, I'd already taken steps to prevent myself from thinking about shit like that. Namely, I'd just landed on Interstellar's stomach with both feet, and I think the poor kid damn neared popped under the pressure. His chest snapped forward with the force, and I missed having my nuts bashed in with his helmet by a scant few centimetres.

I opened my mouth - to either scream out a warning to everyone else or fire off an insult, I'm not sure which - when a glowing butterfly came into being around Interstellar's face. The kid's pained expression morphed into a twisted grin, and before I could even think to move away, a pale light rushed down the fingers of the hand that had been clasped around my ankle.

"…Well, shit."

I stared Interstellar in the eyes as his magic worked wonders on me, defiant to the end. This went on for about ten seconds before I realised that nothing had happened. Interstellar wasn't even looking at me anymore; his attention was firmly placed at my side, exactly where I could feel my missing hand clenching and unclenching with no issues whatsoever.

_You what mate._

I blinked at my hand, my brain working harder than ever before. I'd taken the tie off my arm to make sure it didn't get in the way… what would have happened if I  _didn't?_  Nothing good, I'd wager, seeing as the mere thought sent shivers down my spine.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Interstellar slowly letting go of my ankle. Even slackened, his grip was making me feel numb all the way down to the bones, which was as good confirmation as any that Hawkmoth had given him a little extra. The luminescent butterfly burst back into life a second later, which was when I decided that I should probably get the fuck out of dodge.

Good thing too, because as soon as I was out of his grasp, the temporary supervillain slammed both palms onto the ground beside him, digging out a crater that would have been deep enough to shatter bones after the fall had I not clumsily jumped away. In fact, clumsily was too polite a word to even use, considering the angle I landed on left me no choice but to attempt a roll, lest I shatter my knees.

You'll be happy to know that my knees were fine. My head, on the other hand, suffered some slight ouchies when I bounced it against the concrete. Some who witnessed this grand moment of mine would go on to say that my choice to get involved was foolhardy and stupid. I would look at them, take a moment to parse the haze of a concussion, remember that I once had to bumble away from a small child like a baby panda, and then agree completely.

At least Interstellar had dropped his own ass into a hole. It gave me a second to uncross my own eyes, sit up so my eyes were peeking over the top of the trench, and actually see what the fuck was happening around me.

The best word for it would have been clusterfuck. People were charging for either door, pushing and shoving their way through. I wouldn't have assume this school was even capable of holding this many students, but there they were. They were all keeping their distance from me as best they could; all except one woman, who appeared to be attempting to direct traffic towards the exits.

She turned around when she heard someone yell, and our eyes just so happened to meet. She gasped, and I quirked an eyebrow, wondering what the chances were that Red would just so happen to be there for me to see.

Also, I was wondering what the fuck her name was.

Also also, why did she look terrified?

"I have you now!"

Ah, right.

How do you grapple with someone that makes things disappear with a touch? Trick question, you don't. The real question is, how do you stay in one piece after jumping on someone that can make things disappear with a single touch? The answer to that one is flounder. Flounder, and use every single dirty trick in the book.

"But Lukas," you would gasp, "He is but a child!"

To which I would reply, "The fuck are you, social services?"

I closed my eyes and heaved a breath through my nose as someone collided with my back, slapping me about the face and chest from behind. Trying to block the outside world from my senses was more to stop my head from spinning than anything else. There was more force behind the attacks than I figured they would be, each one feeling more like a wasp's sting than a child's assault, but that didn't change the fact that Interstellar seemed to be a one trick pony, and I was judging him as such.

Maybe I should have taken him a little more seriously, though, because for some reason my torso was starting to feel a little cold- oh. Oooohhh. There were going to be questions asked later about this.

His weight offered no restriction as I climbed to my feet, wrapping my fingers around his forearms as I did so. He seemed to realise that I was up to something, but I tightened my grip to a level that should have probably hurt him before he could slip his arms off my body, looking for all the world like I was giving the child a ride on my back through the destroyed courtyard.

Except I was a bit shirtless. Only a bit, because I still had sleeves, and this doesn't help my case at all, does it?

The whimsical and/or criminal implications died a quick death when I tipped over backwards, firmly keeping Interstellar between me and the ground. He hit the stones with a huff, and I landed atop him with a crack, his helmet slamming into the back of my head. I swear if my skull didn't break apart like a fucking egg before the day was done, it would be a miracle.

Interstellar had stopped moving. For a moment I was worried, until he started struggling and I started to silently curse myself for taking the brief reprieve for granted.

"Let me go!"

"You seem to have a lot of internalised anger," I told him, no reason to not work when you're in the workplace.

"You will rue this day! I will ensure that! Your life will become nothing but regrets!"

I rolled my eyes, shifting my weight around to both make him uncomfortable and make myself more comfortable. Fucking drama queen let out a rasp at that, like I was crushing his lungs or something. "Too late, buddy."

Interstellar continued to screech at me. It might have been intimidating if I wasn't forcing him to hug me. His arms continued to squirm while people hurried to clear out around us, and after a minute of doing very little but lie still, look at the sky, mourn my hearing, watch at the comet slowly drifted over until it was floating above my head-  _what._

Interstellar's hands were still glowing, though this time, he'd twisted them to the point where the wrists looked like they'd been dislocated. He twitched the fingers of his left hand, bringing the comet a little more to the side. At this point, it was beginning to block out my view of the sun, which was actually very helpful for my current position.

Less helpful was when Interstellar clenched both his fists, and the damn thing began to plummet. And holy shit, it looked a lot bigger than it had when I was smashing a chair over a child's head.

"This is my life now!" I threw myself to the side, Interstellar trailing behind me like a whiny cape. The comet landed right where we had been, kicking up a sparkly cloud. It would have been a beautiful, embarrassing death. Embarrassingly beautiful. Beautifully embarrassing.

"Hold still!" Interstellar yelled from behind me. His hands were still glowing, tucked safely around my front, and a single gesture from him had the comet rising again.

To the collective screams of the people still around us. I guess you really are what you eat, escar- ** _GO GET ME SOME FUCKING HELP!_**

Alright, screw this. That's, what, three attempts on my life in two minutes? Occasionally, I would draw the line at three. However, seeing as I'd woken up this morning in a kitchen, the line was sitting on a solid two. The freebie had been given out due to the assailant being a child.

Thereby and thusly, if there was ever a time in my life to become a Disney channel villain, it would be now.

I let Interstellar's left arm go, swinging him off my back like a sack of potatoes. The comet veered with the movement, sweeping around my head and slamming into the ground somewhere behind where I was standing. As per the design of the incredible narrow trench we were in, I'd just so happened to roll towards the wall when I was escaping the comet, which was where I decided to deposit Interstellar.

Now, the plan had been to pin his arms to the wall, and then come up with a new plan when he realised he could erase the wall. Yes, I know, I'm thinking it too. I could shower for an eternity after this and it still wouldn't be enough to wash away the shame.

As it turned out, however, due to the squirming nature of one teenage would-be-coerced-murderer, I instead slammed Interstellar's right hand into the side of his goofy helmet. It disappeared before my very eyes, which gave me an excellent view of the way the child underneath widened his eyes. For a moment, we just stared at one another in varying degrees of surprise, before something in my brain clicked.

I could feel my mouth curling into a grin, one that showed off far more teeth than necessary.

"You're kidding me, right?" The kid fought me every step of the way as I pushed his right hand up to his own face. Strangely enough, he wasn't nearly as strong physically as I was expecting. He wasn't saying anything, but the glow around his hands was flickering on and off rapidly. "Your own powers can work against you, huh?"

The glow brightened for a moment, which was when I managed to tap at his glasses with his own index finger. They disappeared in a flash of light that had us both squinting.

Immediately, a butterfly outline lit up Interstellar's face. His eyes, narrowed now that he couldn't see properly, grew unfocused, the muscles in his arms tensing beneath my grip. I would still swear that I could hear the comet shifting about behind me, and in response, I did the only thing that came to mind that could possibly help me right now.

"Why are you hitting yourself?"

It was like a switch had been flipped. In a matter of nanoseconds, all glow had left Interstellar's body, his hands due to what must have been instinct, and the butterfly due to the fact that I'd just slapped him across the face with his own appendage. Going off noise, alone, the comet crashed back to the ground.

I repeated it twice with each hand, jabbing about his face with his own hands and hopefully filling him with shame and humiliation. A poke with his left hand had his fingers dangerously close to his nostril, and because I am a bad person, that gave me a bad idea.

I slapped him with his hand once more for good luck. He appeared to be stunned, which gave me the few seconds needed to advance to step two of my plan. Codename; Operation How-The-Fuck-Did-I-Get-Into-This-Situation-Please-Let-This-Bullshit-Work.

I let go of his forearms, and grabbed his hands. He jolted in my grip, but I still had enough time to do what I wanted to do. In a heartbeat, both his hands had been curled into fists with the index finger extended, and with a sort of dexterity that only adrenaline and cartoon physics could give me, I grabbed him around the wrists and shoved both hands against his mouth.

Then, I pulled them up.

I couldn't actually tell if I wanted someone to be recording or not. There was just so many reasons for either side.

"Give me your lunch money!" I shouted, in the hopes of triggering some sort of PTSD flashback, in order to give myself an advantage over my small, frail, most likely asthmatic foe. Standard rules for playground bullying had gone out the window the second poindexter had bitched to the literal antithesis of an authority figure and been granted superpowers. I needed to even the field out somehow.

Of course, I did not approve on my current actions, and neither did my employer. Nor did Hawkmoth, though I didn't know his feelings on the matter for certain, but he needed all the positive PR he could get. Actually, seeing as he'd made the kid evil in the first place, that was kind of admitting that he did share my current views- I mean condoned my choice in proceedings.

Disclaimer: Shut up.

Interstellar honked in rage. Or asphyxiation, it was hard to tell. "Unhand me!"

It was like being threatened by a duck with a cold. "Nothing you could say to me could possibly make me do that. I'll never let go."

Interstellar's gaze hardened to something resembling hatred. A glow began to build in his hands, before he seemed to think better of it. His nostrils lost their luminescence as he took a deep breath.

"I will let you live only until you build your family. Then, I will kill you slowly, in front of your wife and children, and then I will start my own family! They will be taught to continue this pattern against your family for as long as the human race exists! My descendants will never let yours rest! Everything that originates from you will meets its end by my hand!  ** _All your lineage will ever know is pain!"_**

…Oooo _kay._ Someone had just earned themselves a boat-load of mandatory sessions, because that sounded way too practiced for my liking. There was no good reason that someone should ever get that angry over a Titanic reference. Especially when they sounded like a chipmunk that had been crossed one too many times.

Slowly, I used my grasp on Interstellar's arms to pull his fingers out of his nose. They were really buried in there, and the less I said about their state when they were finally fully freed, the better. He gave me a look of smug superiority, before glancing expectantly at where I was holding him still.

"Whenever you're-"

**_SLAP_ **

I tried not to laugh. I really did. But there was no helping it, not when I'd just made the poor child's face look like Picasso's rendition of a tree. Despite the situation, a small giggle escaped me, which may very well have been what officially signed my death warrant, if the look I was getting from the boy was anything to go by.

True to form, though, I had to go ahead and make it worse. So, with a voice quaking with laughter and a rapidly loosening grip in the face of hilarity, I opened my mouth and choked out one of the stupidest things I've ever said in my entire stupid life.

"…Why are you hitting yourself?"

Even if I could have seen the comet coming, there was no chance in hell of me getting out of the way in time. The words had barely left my mouth before I was being lifted up into the air with an approximate fuckton of rock and ice and whatever else comets were made of. It hit me so hard that I couldn't actually feel it, though the very loud cracking happening from my back didn't bode well.

I flew right out of the trench. It must have come at me from below, because I cleared the lip of the divot with room to spare. I hit the ground feet first, funnily enough, and it probably would have looked pretty cool if I hadn't kept rolling. And bouncing. Oh good lord, the bouncing.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I rolled to a stop. My hearing was a little bit off, as was my everything else, but I could have sworn I heard my name being called. My vision was clouding over something fierce, but I thought I could make out someone standing above me. I tried to move something, anything, but all I could do was shift one arm. The other was splayed across my stomach, bent in odd angles in at least two places.

I couldn't feel my legs at all.

It could have almost been considered comedic, how fucked up I could come off of a single hit, if the stabbing feelings of my own bones poking into my squishy bits wasn't making me wish I would hurry the fuck up and black out.

And then, the ground below me vanished. How much was now missing, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. All I knew was pain, and even more pain when someone managed to pierce through the white noise buzzing in my ears with a scream.

I uncrossed my eyes with some effort, trying to make them focus. It was a pointless endeavour in most aspects, but it was just enough for me to make out the blob of colour that was almost entirely on top of me, as well as the rushing textures surrounding me.

Someone was falling along with me. I didn't even need to think about it before I was reaching out with the one arm that I could move, grabbing them, and pulling them towards me. They were saying something to me, but all I could do was clutch them tighter as the air whistled in my ears. Hopefully, nothing would work to flip us over on the way down. No sense in having two people go splat if it could be avoided.

This wasn't a position I'd ever found myself in before. A few seconds from death was familiar, damn near comfortable. Falling however many metres towards it, on the other hand? Somewhat less so.

…Maybe Ladybug and Chat Noir would get here before we lande-

**_CRACK!_ **

…Or maybe…

…Not…


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are child labour laws for a reason.

...Maybe…

...Not…

**Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum…**

_“...The hole… Bustier…”_

 “Wa- up! Don’t- g-!”

_“...Noir... lot of blood…”_

**Ba-dum… Ba-dum…**

_“Looks really bad…”_

It hurt… it hurt so fucking badly...

**_“I AM-!”_ **

_“T-”_

_“Luck- arm!”_

**Ba-dum…**

_“Cataclysm!”_

**…**

_“...Not breathing-!”_

“MIRACULOUS LADYBUG!”

**XxX**

Now, I don’t mean to brag, but I’d had some experience in the past with making bad decisions. You could say that my life started due to the whims of a bad decision, which gave me all the more authority to say this with the utmost certainty; That had been a bad idea.

No, actually, bad wasn’t nearly enough emphasis for how terrible that idea had been. Had I a forest’s worth of paper, I wouldn’t have been able to write down even half of the reasons why that had been the worst idea I’ve ever had in a very long time. I could use the sky as a canvas for the mural of my stupidity, and run out of room.

That grand series of events had hurt. A lot. The pain had been so bad that I couldn’t even feel it anymore _what?_

My eyes shot open, which just added another point to whatever was counting the number of dumb decisions I’d made today. For a city that had been dreary and miserable not twenty-four hours ago, the sunlit sky of Paris sure was acting pretty damn peachy.

Birds chirped along to the distant hustle and bustle of traffic, flapping through the crisp air without a care in the world.

It was at that moment that I noticed my lungs. To be more specific, they felt like they’d each shrunk down to the size of a grape, and I couldn’t say for certain that I’d actually taken a breath in a while. I sucked down some air, which may as well have shattered a cacoon of glass directly out of my chest. I choked, spluttered, and couldn’t help but curl around myself as the pain got worse.

The cement was far too warm against my cheek after I rolled over. A tremor ran down my spine when another attempt at a breath just sent a few aching lances down each of my limbs.

Someone lay a hand against my shoulder, while what I could only assume was their other hand rubbing circles across my back.  They were saying something to me, the voice feminine, but I couldn’t actually understand what she was saying over my own grunts and gasps.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if my heart was in the process of exploding. Was this a side effect of the Akuma? Were Chat Noir and Ladybug even on the scene? There was no screaming, so either everyone had managed to clear out, or they had been forcibly removed. I was going to be pissed the fuck off if I got half the bones in my everything shattered for no reason.

The option of getting out of the way didn’t feel all that plausible right about now.

Speaking of, how was I even movi-

**_DONK_ **

 Okay what the fuck.

I rolled back over and sat up, agony in my chest all but forgotten as I rubbed at my stinging cheek. Clearly I was uncomfortable and in pain, and then someone went ahead and hit me _more?_

I caught some sort of movement at the corner of my eye, twisting my head so rapidly that it may have been surprising that I didn’t snap my own spine. It was the baton being held by the little fursuit fucker that had hit me, and I opened my mouth to have a few very choice words about him, his fashion sense, and his chosen lifestyle.

What I got instead was a gob full of red hair, and a pair of arms strangling the life out of my neck. I tried to struggle for a moment, but even my horrifically oxygen-deprived brain could identify the situation I’d found myself in.

It was a bear hug, in close proximity to the female form. Like some greenhorn directly out of childhood, I’d been captured in her embrace in under a second.

I would have fallen backwards again and bashed my skull into unconsciousness, had the option been available to me. Unfortunately, I was being held up in a grip that seemed to slowly be increasing in intensity. Hey, actually, this was a good thing. A few more seconds and I might just be able… to pass out…

…She wasn’t letting go. I reached up and pawed at her shoulder, trying to give her the hint to unhand me or tap out or something, but she wasn’t letting go. Shit, my lungs were beginning to burn again. Frantically, I moved my eyes around to try to look for some help, rasping out a request to please let the fuck go as the pressure began to bend my spine.

Damn it woman, I’d already died for you once, let go before it happened again-

Darkness encroached on my vision, and even with all my struggling, I could feel my own limbs growing too heavy to move. How was this lady so damn strong? Was it the same alternate reality bullshit that Fu was using when he slammed a dent into my car with his teeth, or was she just some sort of freak?

“Uhh, Mademoiselle Bustier? I don’t think he’s conscious anymore.”

Oh boy, aren’t you wrong?

The last thing I heard before conking out entirely was the newly named Mademoiselle Bustier’s, “Oh no!” she then proceeded to push me away as though our contact had burned her, which only led to me falling over backwards far faster than I should have.

I was only just conscious enough to feel the pain in my skull and the wetness trickling down the back of my neck before finally, _mercifully_ blacking out.

How fucking embarrassing.

**XxX**

“How is he doing, Master?”

“I have healed more than half of the damage, he shall wake up soon. Thank you for your help, Wayzz.”

“Of course, Master.”

Master Fu’s voice being the first thing I heard upon waking up wasn’t welcome. Him somehow knowing exactly where I’d been taken after dying and then falling unconscious wasn’t welcome. Him healing me, _again_ , while I wasn’t awake to consent to something like that, _again_ , was not fucking welcome.

It took some doing, but eventually I managed to open my eyes. The room swam for a moment, ceiling and walls blurring into one another in a mishmash of greys and whites, but after a few seconds my severely abused brain was able to adjust to it.

There were a few posters on the wall, hanging over a desk that had a tablet propped up by some books. Beside that was a few shelves, and on the other side of the door was another bed, this one white enough to be blinding. If I had to guess, I would have said that I was in some kind of nurse’s office, which likely meant that I was still at the school. There wasn’t nearly enough noise for it to be an actual surgery.

The first actual colour I saw and could identify was green, as Wayzz drifted into my sight. He stared at me for a moment, before his mouth quirked into a little smile and he turned around.

“Master, he’s-“

I threw the covers off of me and stood up, being careful to avoid actually jostling Wayzz. I had no problem with the little fairy thing, but at the same time, I couldn’t be bothered waiting around to see what was in store for me this time.

Thankfully, I was still wearing my clothes, even if the back of my collar was uncomfortably stiff and scratchy. It would be an awkward walk at this time in the day, but it was one I was more than willing to go on.

“Where are you off to?”

Fu was on the left side of the room, the opposite side of the door. That made things easy, I didn’t even have to look at him.

“Home. I’m not dealing with this shit, it was a big enough mistake thinking I could.”

“Giving up so soon?”

I stopped at that, one hand resting on the doorway, before slowly turning around. My head hurt, my eyelids felt heavy, and I could still remember the feeling of blood on my neck, but I mustered up the best glare that I could manage in those circumstances regardless.

“Fight your own fucking battles.” Twisting back around, my mind kept going even as my body stopped, and I had to reach for the door with shaking hands just to stay upright. “I already gave my life for the cause.”

I’d died. The thought sent shivers down my spine; for a space of however many minutes, I was dead. And for all his effort and pretty words, Fu didn’t even seem to care.

Maybe, if I’d sat down and really taken a look at everything that had happened, I would have seen through whatever façade he’d had up. Right then and there, I couldn’t find it within myself to care. That single sentence had banished all the faith I’d inexplicably had in him.

I tried to swing the door shut behind me, and nearly faltered when it failed to move even a little bit. A single glance down told me exactly why that was; the head of a very specific cane was resting against the hinges, innocent in appearance and precise in application.

“I expected your resolve to last a little longer than this.”

And with that cast of a net, I was trapped.

If I decided to just walk away, then he would feel free to come back to me. I had something that he wanted, and the fact that I was here with him right then and there was evidence that he could get it from me. If I decided to confront him, then he would have the advantage, because I already owed him my life twice over. He could use that against me, spin some poetic about whatever the fuck he wanted and charm me back to his side of the debate.

Either way, I would be walking away with a loss, and he would have another instance to hold over me. Playing with my life, quite literally.

“Yeah, so did I. Turns out that getting taken out by some school teacher with a waist as thick as my forearm is a massive blow to my confidence, who fucking knew?”

Fu was old, with the air of a grandfather who only wanted to see the best of his grandchildren. He inspired others around him, made them want to make him proud without even trying, and that was precisely why he was so dangerous.

There’s a good reason being disappointed is worse than being mad. Especially to children, and who exactly had Fu chosen to represent the side of good?

“You can’t run away after a single failure-“

“Don’t give me that obtuse mentor _shit_.” I turned back around, switching the hand that was clasped around the door. His cane back by his side, a raised eyebrow the only difference on his face. “You haven’t earned the right to be mysterious with me. Let me guess, you think that I can do something about your circumstances, that you can look into the future and claim that I’m of some great importance or some other shit.”

I had no idea the extent of his abilities, but at this point I wasn’t sure what to believe. Only one thing was certain, and that was the fact that I would be taking everything he had to say with quite a few grains of salt.

My eyes felt like they’d crossed for a second, leaving me devoid of my balance. If I hadn’t already been holding onto something, I probably would have fallen over, but I did my best to ignore it. “Well, you know what I see in my future? I see me being in this school every time something goes wrong. I see me stepping in because it’ll get to the point where I can’t ignore it anymore. And then, I die, and I have nothing left behind but the hope that some magic beetles can bring me back.”

I ran a hand through my hair, just so I could move it, and slumped slightly into the doorframe. Whatever mirth that had survived on Fu’s face after my awakening had been thoroughly chased off.

“And then rinse, repeat, until something goes wrong and they have to dig me a grave.” I shook my head, and pushed off the wall with a soft grunt. Turning around, I prepared to close the door, not bothering to look around as I delivered what would hopefully be the final nail in the coffin of our interaction.

“I’m not going to stand here and be shamed by the man that conscripted a couple of kids into a war.”

The door closed with a soft click. After what had been said, it felt somewhat anticlimactic. I picked a random direction – right – and started to walk, idly counting lockers as I went. Students passed me by, most giving my bandaged head curious glances and some outright stopping and staring. I ignored them all, keeping my eyes down and to the side.

I didn’t want conversation, but much like the victims of circumstance out there, the world didn’t seem very interested in giving me what I wanted.

“After everything you have done, you choose a time as odd as this to gain a conscious?”

I glanced up at the voice, staring into the doorway I’d been passing. Fu stared right on back, his voice echoing in the empty corridor.

For a moment, I was confused. How had he managed to pass me? Had I just not been looking or was this some more bullshit magical mumbo-jumbo that I didn’t understand. That feeling, though, was awash in quite a few others. Most prominent of which would have been rage, and contempt.

That was a low blow, and a very obvious attempt to get me back into talking about what he wanted to talk about, and it also worked like a fucking charm. My hands clenched, suddenly very eager to fly into one of the lockers on either side of me.

“You came to me when I was _drunk_ and _emotionally compromised_.” I could remember it fairly well, too, which was surprising. Rarely did I drink just as an explicit attempt to get blackout drunk, but if I chose to do so then I typically did a very good job. “You bribed me using my own life, and guess what? I’ve repaid that debt in full.” Technically, I did owe him one more, apparently, but that would only have been valid if the rock I’d taken to the head had actually done some actual damage. Then again, knowing my luck…

“Don’t you fucking dare talk like you have any context for the shit I’ve done. As far as I can tell, you don’t even exist in the world effected by those choices, you have no fucking clue-“

“Oh, but I _do_.”

I stopped short as Fu’s voice easily overrode mine. The man hadn’t shouted, had barely lost the whimsical tone that was all I’d ever heard come out of his mouth, but there was a weight behind his words that quite simply pushed whatever I had to say out of the way.

Fu tapped his cane on the ground. Was that the noise of wood meeting tile, or was that the noise of the foundations of the school cracking beneath where he stood? It said more to me than anything that I actually had to question that.

“You think this outcome pleases me? If he remains uncontested, Hawkmoth will do irreparable damage to the world.” Well, I’d already kind of figured that. Even from what I’d seen in the very small amount of time I’d been here, the most anyone could come up with was that he was a madman at best. “The only ones I could find that were worthy of wielding the Ladybug’s earrings and the Black Cat’s ring were children, and not a day will go by where I will not have to live with that decision, no matter the outcome.”

I couldn’t help but gape when I heard that, because that fact was fucking astonishing. Whatever criteria Fu would use to judge people, that didn’t matter so much as the results. And for the heroic potential of an entire city to lie within two kids was phenomenal.

In the worst possible way.

The fuck was even the point of fighting for the greater good if it seemed to only be present in two people?

“The fact remains that a decision had to be made, and I was the one to make it.” I was distracted from wondering how France could be considered the City of Love when Fu levelled me with a harsh glance, the most intense one I’d ever seen him muster. “I would have assumed that you would know the pain of having to make a choice like that, but it seems I was mistaken.”

And that was the crux of the matter. Fu would never know how wrong he was in that instant, because I was never going to tell him that he wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t come halfway across the world to have fun, and I wasn’t very unconcerned about how I got here because I was willing to go back.

“I’m sorry, but I choose to live.”

I would live with the choices I made, but I was _not_ the person Fu was looking for. He would need someone who could take on those responsibilities. I was not willing to stand in front of another comet, and I was not ready to try to bring order to a classroom.

Fu shook his head slowly, his shoulders drooping. He looked like he was aging by the minute, less and less energy managing to make it up to his face. After a moment, he seemed to give up the battle, and some of the light that had been present in his eyes until that point just… vanished. Damn it, even if I knew that it shouldn’t have affected me at all, it still killed me a little bit inside that I had been the one to do that.

“You chose to slowly murder yourself with liquor and cigarettes. You chose to be in pain and alone. You, Lukas, were too cowardly to choose death when life was the last thing you wanted.”

I grimaced, ironically wishing that I could light up a cigarette right about now. Besides the fact that I hadn’t brought any with me, I don’t think I would have been inconsiderate enough to light up in a school corridor. Not everybody shared or appreciated my vices, no matter how badly I needed them.

Fu tried to seek out my gaze, but I looked away before he could succeed. If I was reading this all right, he needed me a lot more than I needed him, and empathy was something that was easy enough to ignore on its own. Regular people did it every single day, after all.

“You say that I do not understand when you are guilty of the exact same thing.”

“And whose fault is that?” I asked, still looking down the corridor. People were walking across the opening, some alone and others in groups, though none of them were looking towards us. From the corner of my eye, I could see Fu tap against the ground with his cane again. The noise very clearly travelled, and yet still nobody even turned to look.

A new voice chose that moment to pipe up, clearing their voice to catch my attention. I turned back around, seeing Fu standing still with his eyes closed and his hands crossed atop his cane. Wayzz had perched upon his shoulder, his disproportionate eyes staring a hole right through me.

It occurred to me in that moment that Wayzz had absolutely been against this entire thing since the very beginning. Which I suppose meant it would be up to Fu to pick up that phone, because it was his little buddy that had fucking called it.

“The last recorded person in this world with no magic decided to build their own.” Wayzz’s eyes clouded over for a moment, a small smile stretching across his face for all of two seconds before it had vanished. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what he’d been thinking, which was good, because I wasn’t feeling all too intelligent in that moment. “They were the first bridge between humankind and Kwami. They were the one to create the jewels that allow magic as old as the universe itself to be woven throughout the human body. By wielding nothing, he had the power to change the world, and he decided to bring forth heroes. _Champions_.”

Fu’s eyes opened in that moment, catching me in their light.

“That is your legacy.”

So, once in a hundred-generation ability, old mentor, even older magic, and an entirely different world where this was all happening…

…You’re fucking kidding me.

Crap, I didn’t even have any family here. I had the anti-magic! Good lord, I was the Chosen One!

I didn’t want to be the damned Chosen One! All the shit they were through on a regular basis totally wasn’t worth the time invested, and good luck to whatever poor unfortunate soul who had the bad luck to become my love interest.

…Crap, my forehead was still wrapped up in bandages, and I’d just learned magic was a real thing. If I got home and saw a lightning bolt scar in the mirror, I was going to throw myself out of a closed window. Maybe the Eiffel Tower had a few, just so I could really embrace the local culture and concrete in my final moments.

Even so, potential mental breakdown aside, I was still part of a conversation concerning something pretty major. What had I even been arguing, again?

Oh, right.

“Yeah, and he created Hawkmoth. Apparently one of the greatest threats of the modern world.”

“Hawkmoth is an anomaly.” Fu’s hands tightened around the head of his cane. It looked like what he was saying was physically painful for him. “None who wish to do harm should ever have the ability to gain a Miraculous. His circumstances are suspicious at best.”

I still wasn’t all too aware of what a Miraculous was even supposed to be, but I was starting to get a bit of a clue.

“So he has a little fairy too, then?” I gestured towards Wayzz, who had taken to floating off some little ways off to the side at some point. “A… what was the word, Kwami?”

“He does, yes.” It was Wayzz who answered me this time, which made sense. Fairy matters were probably his forte in this relationship, after all. “Nooroo is bound to Hawkmoth and has to follow his orders, be it for power or information.”

I couldn’t help but slap a hand to my forehead when I heard that. Please fucking tell me that wasn’t just a stipulation that all magic fairies had to live with. Please tell me Fu hadn’t dumped that sort of ultimate magic power, uncontested, into the hands of two kids.

“Why? Why does this Nooroo have to bend over backwards for a human?” My voice was muffled slightly through my hand, not to mention nasally after being forced through my somewhat crushed nose, but I had to ask regardless. Was it because Hawkmoth had fucked with his Miraculous? Dark magic ritual? Blackmail? Was Nooroo just a dickhead? Come on, Wayzz, fucking give me something akin to faith here. “The way I’ve been led to understand it, I thought Kwami were supposed to be some grand gods, or-or ultimate power, or _something_.”

Wayzz’s eyes shifted to the side. “That… is not for me to say.”

Hahaha. Shit.

I’m going back to Australia.

If there’s a kangaroo Kwami out there, then I was going to brain myself with a boomerang.

“That’s… yeah, that’s what I thought.” I turned on my heel, marching off down the corridor. Moving out here had been expensive, and I didn’t know how exactly I was going to get back across the world when I couldn’t afford a plane ticket, but one step at a time. “We’re done here, I’m getting out of the way before something else goes wrong. You want me to help against Hawkmoth, give me a knife, an address, and enough desperation to do something with them.”

What felt like a wave of ice washed across my back.

“I can’t let you walk away with what you have learned.”

Nice try, asshole.

I kept right on walking.

 “Kill me then.” I shot a glance over my shoulder, raising one eyebrow mockingly. “I mean, according to you, that’s secretly what I want, right?”

Needless to say, I had my doubts he would actually do it. Really, at this point he didn’t have all that much of a leg to stand on. The position I could apparently fill had been the cause of all these issues in the first place. Being in the place he’d put me had ended up with me dying, which was still a very odd thing to think about, I’ll have you know.

My poor abused skull could even be the compensation for me hitting him with my car in that hectic first day. If anything, he owed _me_ , for eating my food. He had nothing on me, and his initial approach had fucked him right from the beginning.

Honestly, I wasn’t entirely convinced that he’d been attempting to con me, even from the very beginning. He’d been disingenuous, of course, and he’d refrained from telling me a whole hell of a lot, but that was the way it stood. He’d made me come here, made me get involved, and I had a sneaking suspicion he’d known that I was going to get myself hurt. It was just the extent of it that neither of us had expected.

Or I could have just been trying to see the best in him, for some reason.

Hell, maybe all I’d managed to do was convince him that I couldn’t take proper care of myself. In which case, leaving before something else could happen was still the best option.

And there was a very good chance that he knew that, because otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to keep talking.

“I am not asking you to fight for me, or for the Miraculous. I’m not asking you to fight at all.” I’m pretty sure I’d already displayed my fighting prowess. To be fair, I would have straight up punched the dude if he wasn’t a child, but I’d done my best under the circumstances. “Ladybug and Chat Noir are more than capable of dealing with this mess. What I was requesting was that you be there for the others.”

Fu gestured down the corridor with his cane. I turned back around to follow his line of sight, along the rest of the noticeably empty hallway we were standing in. Not five meters away, schoolkids hustled and bustled towards their classes, laughing and shoving and talking and generally acting like me and the space I was standing in didn’t even exist.

Then again, magic.

I heard Fu making his way beside me and kept my eyes resolutely forward. Just as he reached level with me, I saw him; walking along with a kid with a cap and headphones was the hairstyle that had been attached to the baton that had hit me before. His steps faltered as soon as I’d made the connection, and his neck snapped around quick enough to give him whiplash.

He stared directly at me, his eyes narrowing for a brief second. He seemed to be the centre of quite a bit of attention, seeing as nearly every female in the general vicinity had been staring at him and were now curiously looking in the same direction as he was.

“Uhhh, dude, why’re you lookin’ at the wall like that?”

Well, I guess that explained that.

I watched on as Chat Noir shook his head, responded to his friend, and gave me one last curious glance. I didn’t know if he was actually able to see me, or if there was some freaky feline instincts or whatever involved, but either way, he was gone soon enough.

It barely took a few seconds for the rest of the students to get moving, and soon enough, the hustle and bustle of general activity had returned. Fu cleared his throat as a particularly rambunctious group ran past, shoving and laughing and generally making a massive nuisance of themselves.

“All I was asking was that you be someone to put the pieces back together. For the children constantly caught in the cross-fire just for unknowingly befriending some superheroes. For when their resilience ran thin. Though perhaps Wayzz was correct, this was my second mistake after all.”

I took a step forward and scoffed. ‘Second’ mistake? Pretentious asshole.

“Would you just guilt trip anyone if they didn’t do what you wanted, or am I just a special case?” I stopped a single step away from the rest of the world, and slowly lay a hand against the seemingly thin air before me. It distorted inwards, there but not quite, like a layer of clear cellophane. “Actually, you know what, no. I don’t want an answer, and I don’t want to see you ever again. Nice to meet you, though, Wayzz.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t walk away while still misunderstanding what I’m trying to say.”

I pressed my hand against the barrier, until it grew taut against my hand. I could break it, easily.

“Well then, maybe you should have rephrased it.”

With that, I pushed through the bubble of air, and landed out in the corridor.

I didn’t draw any attention when I stepped through whatever barrier Fu had managed to erect, glancing behind me as I went. Just as that student had said, I was met with nothing but a wall, unassuming brick and plaster. Part of me wanted to figure out what was behind that wall, and where I’d actually been standing, but that part paled in comparison to the urge to just cut my losses and get the fuck out of this place.

Some stares were directed my way as I marched through the hallways, though nobody tried to approach me. Even if common courtesy seemed to be a thing that was slowly but surely dying out, people would be far less likely to bother you if you looked busy, and at that moment I was a man on a mission. Aside from that, I had bandages going around my head and, now that I bothered to look, both of my legs, and I was walking with a noticeable limp.

So maybe it was less courtesy, and more them hoping that a nice man in a white suit would make the first move.

I had no idea where I was actually going beyond some signs that I was still amazed I could even read, and none of them were pointing me towards the door. On the bright side, I now knew the way to the library, and it also gave me some time to observe the students in their natural habitat.

They looked… fine. Like they hadn’t even realised there had been an attack on the school. It was pretty sad in a way, that Hawkmoth had apparently become such a pain in the ass that everybody was just sick of his shenanigans, and not afraid for their fucking lives. There wasn’t even any tension in the dull chatter that filled the air, it was like everyone had managed to decompress from the stress at the push of a button.

Maybe there was more to Ladybug than anyone knew.

There were a few students that I recognised as I trudged around in search of the exit. There was a blonde girl that roller her eyes at me when she passed, and seriously, the fuck was her problem? She didn’t even react to my glare, so I could only assume that she either had nerves of steel, or she was a fucking idiot. The girl she was with was also someone I’d seen in that classroom, though she looked like she’d be more at home solving mysteries with a talking dog.

There was probably a Kwami for that. Maybe I should look that shit up in a book or something.

…How the hell did I get back to the library after all that?

Someone passed me by too close for me to ignore, breaking my glare at the blonde brat and forcing me to step to the side. I got a rushed apology before the girl – who was wearing ridiculously bright clothing – pounced on another girl, who had been standing next to a printer.

Her eyes seemed a bit misty. Must have been happy to see her friend after the attack.

“Juleka!”

Ahhh, so this was the elusive Juleka. She was very… purple. I could appreciate that.

“Rose?” Her voice sounded like she was two steps away from stabbing someone. I could appreciate that too. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

The other girl, Rose, shook her head so quickly that I wasn’t sure how she managed to keep her balance. “No, Mlle. Bustier went home for the day, Principal Damocles gave her the day off.”

I couldn’t be too sure, but Rose’s voice sounded like it may have been wobbling a little bit. Also, Mlle. Bustier? Was that perhaps…?

“Oh yeah, some dude died on her, right?” I winced. Yeah, that was probably as good as reason as any to take a personal day. I don’t think either of them even knew I could hear them, or that I was even there. It wasn’t like I was hiding; if anything, I was holding up any traffic that was trying to get into the library by standing directly in the middle of the doorway.

Juleka’s blank expression softened into concern, and she leaned down further into Rose’s space. I couldn’t see Rose’s face from where I was standing, but whatever was on it brought a small frown forth from her taller friend. “Are you okay?”

Rose’s shoulders shook, and I could only make out, “teleported into space” before she smaller girl was enveloped in a hug.

…Son of a bitch. Space, huh?

I guess it would have made sense, considering everything Interstellar had going for him. Was that where my hand had been, floating along past stars and planets? What had it seen up there?

If what I was watching was any indication, probably nothing good.

A fat lot of good jumping in had been, apparently. It hadn’t done anything worthwhile. _I_ hadn’t done anything worthwhile. That was a fucking depressing thought.

_Put together the pieces, huh…?_

I should have walked away in that moment. I knew nothing about either of these girls, and Juleka would probably be far better at cheering up her friend than I would. I absolutely should have walked away, but instead of doing that, I instead chose to walk forward, and seal my fate.

“Rose and Juleka, was it?”

Both looked up in surprise. To be fair, they had a fair way to look before they got to my face. Juleka seemed to recognise me a few seconds before Rose did, if her stiffened posture relaxing was anything to go by.

I didn’t give them a chance to respond, because if I stopped for even a second, I would end up thinking and deciding against this. I could almost see Fu’s satisfied smile in my head as I did so, but you know what?

Fuck it. Fuck him, and especially fuck Hawkmoth. This would definitely explode in my face, because it wouldn’t be me if it didn’t, and all I could hope to do was make sure the detonation would be magnificent.

“I need someone to show me to the principal’s office. Can I count on you two?”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Working class man.

I would come across as a broken record if I kept going on about my bad ideas any longer.

The thing about that, though, is that what I was currently doing didn't really feel like that bad an idea. On the contrary, it felt like a smarter idea than many that I'd had in recent memory.

Juleka and Rose were, as their appearances suggested, very colourful characters. Juleka had been fairly quiet for most of our walk, chipping in a few words here and now, but every time I'd glanced down at her, she'd seemed fairly content. Rose had taken a little while to calm down, which I'd probably unconvincingly pretended not to notice, but she'd gradually managed to drag me into a conversation about nothing and everything.

Pretty impressive for only a few minutes of interaction at most. Girl had a gift.

It probably helped that neither of them had seen fit to discuss my… shall we say, little expedition from life. To my face, at least.

"I'll listen to pretty much anything, really. I like rock, basically all metal, and electronic more than anything else, though." The conversation thus far had shifted between their last names, to their pets, and had landed on their favourite subjects in school. Somehow, music had gotten into the mix. Talking to these two was very easy, which only made my job easier, I suppose. "That being said, my voice is best suited for singing… probably punk music, honestly."

Rose somehow brightened even further upon hearing that. We would need to wait on results to come back from the lab before I could tell you how that was even scientifically possible.

"You can sing!?"

I scratched at the back of my neck as we passed through a set of doors and ended up back outside, into the newly restored courtyard. "I suppose it depends on who you ask-"

That set off a bombardment of requests that were intense enough to stop us all in our tracks. Once we managed to get moving again, it was with far more attention drawn to me than I would have liked, as we ascended a staircase to the soundtrack of me singing about my father taking me to see a marching band when I was a young boy.

My tastes had been predetermined by the world I had been a part of for all my waking memory. I was born in this hole, and I would die in this hole.

It was too bad that I had to pretend to be an adult once we reached the principal's office, I'd just been starting to remember what having fun felt like.

**XxX**

Principal Damocles, as was the title printed across the plaque on the door, was the type of man who hunted small rodents for food and whose neck could rotate a full 360 degrees.

Well, I mean, not  _really_. Probably. But he still looked like a strange fusion between a human and a totem pole, which was more than enough to fuel what others would call my initial dismissal of him entirely. My first impression of him sitting behind that desk, looking up at me with steepled fingers and a very pronounced frown, was interesting even to me.

He seemed very severe, his thick facial hair only enhancing that effect, but nothing about him immediately screamed out "respectable". I don't even know how I could have gone about explaining it, but the man just didn't seem to have the same presence as, say, Fu. As pissed off with Fu as I was, I could still ascertain that much.

Maybe I was just being so dismissive because I was still getting used to being alive again, but the upcoming conversation wasn't one that I found myself keen to have. That wasn't a great sign, all things considered. He didn't seem very thrilled at the prospect of interacting with me, either, if the tired sigh he gave was any indication.

"Lukas, correct? You applied for the councillor position?" Damocles rummaged through one of the drawers on his desk for a second, pulling out three separate folders and a newspaper before shifting his attention back over to me. "Take a seat, please. Girls, you're excused."

Muttering a quick thanks to Juleka and Rose, I stepped into the room, closing the door behind me. The office didn't seem to be anything too special, fairly stereotypical if I had to put it into a single word, and so I opted to pull out the chair that was closest to me. There didn't seem to be any differences between the two present.

"Thanks for having me." I considered offering my hand to shake, but Damocles made no move to do so either, so I decided against it in the end. His tone wasn't anything I would call friendly, but he didn't seem openly hostile either.

I couldn't help but wonder what I had possibly done in the short amount of time he'd known I existed that would irritate him.

"Let's just get right down to business, shall we?" Damocles relinked his hands over the folders he'd pulled out of his desk. The man's eyes looked like they were designed for hunting at night time, hot damn. "How am I supposed to trust the collective student body's wellbeing with someone who apparently completely lacks any instinct of self-preservation?"

An eyebrow notched upwards as I leaned back in my seat, one leg kicked over to rest on the other knee. So it was going to be like that, was it?

_Interesting_.

It wasn't the reception I'd been outright expecting, but it wasn't shocking to say the least. From what I could tell, even the fact that Damocles was talking to me implied that not only was the councillor position still open, it needed to be filled. To get an interview within a single day either meant Fu had insanely good connections, which was still entirely possible…

Or they were desperate to fill it.

Not surprising, honestly. One of the first things I had done after getting the internet connected to my new place was look up anything I could on Akumas, which had led me to a map run on a website called the Ladyblog. It had on record the location of every Akuma that Ladybug and Chat Noir had ever needed to take care of, including where people had said they'd started. Collège Françoise Dupont didn't just make an appearance on that thing, it had the highest number of starting dots I'd seen out of the entire city. By a fucking landslide.

It hadn't been too difficult to unearth stories from that, of teachers leaving or students being pulled out by their parents. I'd wanted to know at least something about what I'd been walking into, and this school was a wasp's nest. All those kids out there must have had nerves of steel to have stuck around this long.

Or they were just really stupid.

Considering the tuition fees, I had to wonder.

I couldn't imagine there were very many people clamouring to get a position here at that moment. Even less would want to work in such close proximity to the largest problem currently plaguing this place.

I may have made a mistake when trying to figure out what I could handle, but it didn't seem anyone else was even making the effort to experiment. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only candidate this school had. That left me with only one question left over, aside from how badly I wanted this job;

How badly did they need me to take it?

I had no frame of reference for that one. Personally, I was lukewarm on the entire thing, beyond my own convictions on the matter. Logically, if I had the answer, there were things I could do with it. Demanding a raise, for one, but that felt far too much like bargaining with the lives of children for my liking.

Ignoring all that, though, was the true reason I was even considering all of this. Mainly, Damocles had decided to open up this little dialogue with an insult. With that in mind, what could I get away with before I jeopardised my own standing in this interview?

…Ah well, go big or go home. I didn't face down a literal supervillain with just my wits and a few second-grade bullying tactics to be looked down on by some Strigidae-lookin' motherfucker right out the bat. If he wanted to play with fire the second my ass touched the seat, that was fine, but it was his fault if I decided to turn up the heat.

With that in mind, I steepled my own fingers in turn, twisting my lips into a downright nasty smirk.

"How are you still principal when this shit keeps happening on your watch?"

He was being a bit of a presumptuous fuckhole, trying to lecture me about safety while he was the crash test dipshit without a seatbelt.

Damocles narrowed his eyes at me, the perfect picture of superior annoyance. Honestly, he really did look like an owl that had just had its feathers ruffled.

"You came in here seeking a job, are you sure this is how you want to go about this exchange?"

I could have cackled in that moment, but with some difficulty, I managed to keep my reaction down to just baring my teeth in a smile that was sure to look somewhat demented.

One sentence. One single sentence was all it took to get you, motherfucker. He'd brought up the job immediately, not left me to sweat or take the first step myself. He wanted our attention on it, rather than on the school. He didn't have another thirty or so people lined up waiting their turn behind me, it was either hire me or leave the spot empty.

I wasn't just his last choice, I was his only choice.

It didn't exactly change anything, per se, but I was tired, and a bit hungry, and fairly irritated. I was itching for a smoke, and for the first time in a while, I was forcing myself to go against that craving. I didn't need to overanalyse everything and see if I could lead the man into some kind of trap, but I also didn't need to sit here and be lectured by someone who hadn't even officially made the choice to have any power over me.

Long story short, I was being a prick purely out of spite, because it made me feel slightly better about my lot in life. Also, it was just who I was, and I would be surprised if anything was able to change that.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong, and he had heaps of people lined up that he still needed to get through, but if that was the case then I wouldn't need to be here anyway. That's the great thing about obligations, unless you took them on personally, you didn't have to feel bad about having them taken away from you.

As an aside, I was never planning on having kids.

"I did what I did to ensure that  _your_  students could escape." I was having entirely too much fun with this, and I would be amazed if what I was doing didn't lead to some problems down the line. But hey, what was the worst he could do? Fire me from a job that he had no choice but to give me? Pardon my French, but  _hon hon hon._  "But hey, yeah, let's talk about the job. What is it, exactly?"

Damocles took a deep breath. It occurred to me that I'd said maybe three sentences to the man and he probably already hated me. He would also be signing my pay checks. On the one hand, whoops. On the other, did I really care all that much? Not really. If I was going to be working for the man, I would need all this shit out on the table anyway, before I ended up blindsiding him with my attitude and fucking up even worse in the future.

Amazing what  _fucking dying_  could do for your perspective.

"Here at Collège Françoise Dupont, we pride ourselves on-"

"Dude, dude, I've already bled on this place!" I shook my hands in front of my face, making the principal cut himself off with a surprised sputter. "Skip the spiel and just spit it out, will you? I wanna go home and collapse."

Damocles stared at me for a moment, before hunching over his desk. A thumb and forefinger rubbed at his eyes slowly.

"You are… an interesting fellow." Uhm. No? "You would be filling the role as general school psychologist, specifically focusing on trauma related to Akuma incidents. Your office has already been Akuma-proofed to the utmost of our capabilities, and you have authority to recommend students for a consultation with a more focused medical practitioner."

Damocles sorted through the folders on his desk, setting one aside and pushing another towards me. Figuring it would be of some importance, I leant forward and flicked it open, skipping the first few pages and landing on what looked to be a class photo. A few rows of kids stood against a plain background, with Damocles on one side and… hey, was that Red?

Quickly, my eyes dropped down to the names. She was a teacher, so would her name be in a separate category, or…?

Ah ha, found it. Mlle… Caline Bustier, huh?

"If French in the language of love, English is the language of irony…"

"Pardon?"

I glanced up at Damocles' face, lips clamping together in a hurry once I realised that, not only had I just thought that out loud, it had been in English.

"Nothing, just being offensive." I switched back to French and cleared my throat, taking another look at the class photo. It was a colourful cast, that much was certain, and I found my eyes flickering between faces and names for a minute, before I noticed something amiss.

"Wait… where's Juleka?"

I was beginning to seriously wonder about that. If it wasn't creepy as shit, I would have hunted her down just to snap a photo of my own to test this phenomenon. It was difficult to credit something towards bad luck after finding out magic was real, who was to say curses were bullshit?

"I remember that day, and I remember taking the photo with Caline's class." Damocles' massive eyebrows furrowed. I glanced up at him, before acquiescing to his obvious demand and handing the folder back over. He opened it wide and scanned the page, more wrinkles appearing on his forehead as he scowled down at it. "Surely she's present?"

"She did mention something about a curse." I added, most likely unhelpfully. "Something could have gone wrong. But it's not like nobody picked up on that before the last set, right?"

"This is a copy if that which was sent out." Damocles shook his head. It was kind of sad, how little that surprised me. "It's possibly she was absent for the photo and the administration made a mistake…"

"Great! Potential teenage girl image problems!" I clapped my hands, already not looking forward to my future. My voice was only mostly sarcastic as I leaned back in my chair and palmed at my face, "I fucking hope she's one of the apathetic ones…"

"You're not particularly acting like you want this job, Mr Lukas."

"I appreciate the English titles, makes me feel right at home." I grabbed the other folder, giving it a quick skim and setting it off to the side upon discovering it was only full of school records. Lots of statistics and large words that meant absolutely nothing to me and  _ugh, taking a comet to the back of the face was more fun than this bullshit._  "Look, Principal, just give me a straight answer. What are the chances that you get another candidate for the position?"

I crossed my arms and let my legs sag to the ground. The chair suddenly didn't feel big or comfortable enough. Considering how opulent the damn thing was, I guess that could only be chalked up to a 'me' problem.

"How badly do you need me?"

For a long while, Damocles didn't say anything to me, opting to stare at me silently. I doubt he'd been expecting my interview to turn into his interrogation, but neither of us were really in a great position here. After all, the only reason he would have to tell me anything would be because he had no other choice, and if he had no other choice, then it would probably be bad times ahead.

There were no more footsteps outside the office. A dull, almost inaudible chatter in the air was the only indication that there were still people around us. How anyone could be comfortable enough to even remain in the school, let alone attend classes was beyond me.

Damocles cleared his throat, shifting in his seat. I returned my full attention to him just as he opened his mouth.

"As of yet, I have not been Akumatised. Neither have many of those who are in a position of power to make decisions about my school. The difference between us is that I have been exposed to this many times." One of his hands drifted to a paperweight at the side of his desk, he ran two fingers down the miniature owl statue thoughtfully. "We… are facing termination. As one of the highest profile schools in the region, we are under close scrutiny from several parties, and the lack of action in the face of a threat such as this is unfavourable. However, I have yet been able to find someone willing to work in such close proximity to these poor children, after everything that has happened to them."

Ah. Shit.

Changing schools was no easy task. I'd attended a few in my time, and even if I'd come out relatively alright, I hadn't had to deal with the sort of shit these kids were. They'd already proven themselves to all be magnets for trouble, if the statistics were anything to go by, and shoving hundreds of ticking time bombs into multiple schools didn't sound like the greatest plan ever to me.

The school shutting down wouldn't be the end of the world, or at least my world, but it would likely end up being a huge pain in the ass. Especially when it was brought into consideration that I lived basically down the fucking street from the place. I didn't need enraged monsters running up and down past my place so they could seek revenge on the place that tore them away from their friends, that would just get annoying.

"Are they dangerous?"

"Absolutely not." Damocles didn't even have to think about his answer. I don't think my words had even stopped echoing before he'd told me what I wanted to know. "They are the victims in this situation, plain and simple."

I blew a breath out through the gap in my front teeth, eyes flickering about the office as the shrill whistle drew out for over a quarter of a minute. Nothing I'd heard was an absolute deal breaker, but I already knew I would be busting my ass in the days to come. Even if it was just to appease the people in power, I would probably need to set up a mandatory consultation for every person in the school who had been changed. After that would be figuring out a schedule for those who wanted or needed to come back. Figuring out what funds I had and what I would need would take trial and error, seeing as I'd never done this shit before. Oh, and also, I would be in more danger than pretty much anyone else in the school given the very nature of the job.

People would probably only be coming to me with their vulnerabilities, and vulnerability had a pretty hefty sentence around here.

"…Doable. It'll be a massive pain in my ass, but doable." Understatement of the century. There were only so many school hours in a day, this shit was going to take me  _weeks_. "Shit, I'm gonna need to make some investments… what's the budget? The salary?"

Damocles' eyes shifted over to the side as he fidgeted in his seat.

That could only mean good things, right?

"Mr Lukas, I'm afraid we're… not in the greatest of positions." Damocles cleared his throat, not quite managing to meet my eyes. I was starting to wonder just how this place had managed to remain in operation if things were this fractured behind the scenes. "The mayor has refused to grant us the extra funds necessary to bring the school into its fullest potential, and he… only ever threatens to cut it further with every tantrum his daughter throws."

Had I… had I managed to stumble into a Saturday morning cartoon? Is that what was happening here? My head fell into my hands with a prolonged groan.

I died for  _this?_

"You're offering me a job in a facility that is being held hostage by a brat with too much money and nobody with the balls to say 'no' to her." A job that was implied to be poorly paid, but the hole was already hard enough to fill. No point digging it even deeper. "Absolutely friggin' superb. And you opened the conversation trying to tell me that this school has pride?"

Damocles bristled. I think I could see the hairs of his moustache rising after what I'd just said. Nice to know the man had some fire, even if it was misplaced.

"That is needlessly insulting-"

I held up my hand, cutting him off. Honestly, I was kind of surprised he kept letting me get away with that. With that same hand, I began counting off fingers, shaking it around just for added emphasis.

"Your fucking school sent out a class photo with a student missing, it doesn't matter if the proper one  _was_  taken. According to the Ladyblog, there's been an average of 1.7 Akuma attacks in the courtyard per week ever since the school year started. You've got a  _teenager_  acting like she owns the joint because her self-important father apparently has his hand so far up your ass that he's tickling your brain." I had a fair idea of why Fu wanted me to take a look at this, but talk about all your eggs in one basket. At this point it might have been easier to just bulldoze the joint and start over. "To tell you the absolute truth, Principal, all I've seen and heard so far has been absolutely pathetic. If you're trying to say that telling the damn truth is insulting, then I'm walking out right now, fuck your problems."

"Much of our problems lie with Hawkmoth-"

"Because nobody is doing shit about him. The fucking mayor's more interested in busting your balls than hunting down a damn terrorist in his own city." I couldn't help but recall Fu's words as I shook my head. My lord, maybe Hawkmoth was actually the third most moral person around, and Fu just didn't want me knowing because he was embarrassed. I would believe it at this point. "Nobody knows who or where he is, and his greatest opposition are two teenagers in tights. I'll warn you now, Principal, that if you give me this job, I fully intend upon making waves. You can ride them out or find a damn big rock to hide under. It's entirely your choice."

I didn't bother to bring up the fact that I was almost certain that Ladybug and Chat Noir were under his roof. It wasn't either of our businesses, but I couldn't really make a decision about them without getting the chance to talk to them. The appointments would be a perfect time for that, and if I was wrong about them? Then I was wrong, and all the better off for it.

"So, what's your verdict? I would prefer getting this shit started as soon as possible."

Damocles scowled at me from his perch, and I took that moment to finally break eye contact and glance around his office. There was nothing new that I could see from this angle, though his computer did look fairly top of the line, especially if the establishment was struggling as much as he'd been implying.

"I've been hearing interesting rumours. Is it true that Akuma cannot harm you?"

I snorted outright at that. "Hell no, didn't you see that little bastard drop me down a fucking pit? Only advantage I have is shoving a butterfly back in Hawkmoth's face after telling him to fuck off."

Come to think of it, that car hadn't been there when I left this morning. I had to wonder how anyone had managed to move it, considering the condition I'd left it in.

Catching sight of the look on his face, I hastily tacked on, "If I'm telling that story, I'm telling it once, while all the teachers are present. Last thing I need is different versions of it spreading."

He didn't look too pleased about that, but he did seem to let it go.

"I can understand and accept that. However, you must understand that there are schoolyard bullies out there that have treated young Francis with more respect than what you've just shown him."

Did… did I just hear that right? Was that kid's name actually Francis?

Part of me hoped that wasn't true. Another, much larger part of me hoped that it was.

My voice shook, both from laughter and from sarcasm. "Principal, I feel it's important to be able to differentiate the man from the monster."

If anything, that hadn't been the correct thing to say. Or perhaps it had been the incorrect way of saying it. Damocles leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowing once more, which I acknowledged with nary a sound. I'd said all I'd felt the need to say up until this point, now the decision was entirely in his hands.

It couldn't have been very easy, being in his position. Dealing with me was already enough of a pain without needing something this monumental from me on top of that. Either way, whatever he said now would be the end of this conversation. Even in spite of myself, I was curious as to what his verdict would be.

Either way, I would have some thinking to do. I'd warned Damocles that I was planning on making waves, but I didn't really know in which direction they would be going. Help the students, keep the school running, do what any halfway decent person would do, those were all fairly obvious. That would all be well and good, if it was the only role I could see for myself.

Maybe I was too self-important, or I was massively overestimating the impact I could have, but I'd been dropped into something I didn't quite understand, in a situation that didn't really make all that much sense. You weren't typically able to go back to living a peaceful life after being told that you were a perfect counter to something massively threatening. Add in the facts that Fu had thrown me into the doghouse and I was almost certainly going to be chatting with the faces behind a couple of masks in what could be a matter of hours…

Forgive me for being suspicious.

Damocles finally shifted, heaving a sigh through his nostrils and pushing the folders towards me.

"I'm not thrilled with this outcome, but since I have multiple parties breathing down my neck and nobody else seems to be dumb enough to apply for the position on such short notice, I don't really have any choice but to welcome you to the faculty, Monsieur Lukas." The look on his face was nothing but reluctance as he held a hand out to me. Knowing all too well how it felt to shake hands with people you'd rather not touch, I held his hand for all of two seconds before letting it drop and scooping up the files. "Please don't make me regret this more than I already do, and don't strike another child. I do not care whether or not they are evil at the time."

I got up out of my chair and hopped back, tucking the files under my shoulder and shooting at the Principal with both a winning smile and the highest quality of finger guns I could muster.

Pew pew.

"No promises!"

Damocles just groaned, holding his head in one hand and shooing me out of his office with the other.

**XxX**

My new office was extremely spartan.

A desk sat at the opposite side of the room to the door, an office chair situated behind it. Atop the desk was a tablet, much like many of the others I'd seen in the classrooms. Off to one side was a door that led into another, slightly smaller room, with two chairs facing one another and a lamp sitting on a table in the corner.

That was it. That was all I had. There wasn't even a bookshelf in there. I was legitimately surprised the desk even had drawers.

Opting to ignore the desk for the moment, I swept up the tablet and shouldered my way through to the other room, which seemed to have been designed with appointments in mind. The chairs were plush, though the cloud of dust that exploded into the air when I flopped down into one suggested they'd been here a while.

I pulled my shirt over my nose, ignoring the way the button jabbed into my face as I did so, and flipped through the folders. The first one wasn't of much importance, information on the school and surrounding areas that I could just ask about if it ever became relevant, which it probably wouldn't. It did tell me two things, though; that the school was still afloat due to the tuition fees that were charged, and it was the first time since it opened that it was facing these kinds of problems.

Also that someone was doing a hell of a job covering it all up, because damn if the place didn't  _look_  spick and span.

That folder was flipped shut and flicked out the door fairly quickly. Normally, I would put more stock into having some information about my surroundings, but history of a place I wasn't planning on robbing just didn't manage to appeal to me. I would pick it up later, but it would have to wait for a little while. The next folder was where things got interesting.

It was full of profiles, all of which were for students, all of whom shared the same class. I recognised a lot of the faces from around the school and from what Fu had given me, though the information was far more detailed now that I was actually paying full attention to it.

It seemed these kids were being watched by more than one person. Considering the one thing all but two of them seemed to have in common was that they had all been turned into monsters at some point, that was understandable. Funny how the two left over from those stats were spitting images of the two superheroes that dealt in this shit on a weekly basis.

Look, I'm not saying they wear spandex in their spare time. I am, however, heavily implying it.

Still, there were other kids in that class, and technically they were the ones I was supposed to be focusing on more. In case you were wondering, no, the irony of the situation was not lost on me.

I set that folder aside carefully, trying to not crinkle any of the pages and ruin it for the future. The last folder was a bit thicker than the others, an unassuming yellow piece of cardboard that failed to hint towards the hell contained within whatsoever. I flicked it open with nary a thought – and then stared, eyes wide in silent disbelief.

It was a list. Multiple names across multiple pages, easily numbering upwards in the hundreds.

A list of people, students and teachers, whom had been attacked directly by Hawkmoth.  _Every single name_  on this list would be required to see me, even if only for a half-hour assessment of their mental health.

At least it was looking like I would be able to choose the order of people. There wasn't any indication of who was expected or expecting to go first, though the separate file was probably an indication of something going on behind the scenes. After all, I did come across all their names on the first page.

Which I then actively decided to ignore.

Those kids were top priority, and that was precisely the reason why I needed to have them go last. Fucking them around with scheduling and trying to get through everyone else on top of them would just serve to fracture whatever camaraderie I would ever manage to get with them, and that would only make my job harder. Weeding through everyone else and figuring out who wouldn't actually want or need my services was just as important as helping those who needed it. I didn't have time to focus all my efforts on what needed the most work, so to say, there was just too much to tackle.

My mind made up, I pushed myself out of my chair, heading back into my office and sweeping the tablet up off the desk. I'd chosen a class at random, turning to a page that had five names printed on it, one of which was the teacher that typically took their attendance in the morning.

It took me a few seconds to figure out how to open the contacts list on the tablet, and even longer to turn off the front-facing camera. The dialling tone buzzed five times, and I was about to give up when it clicked and a tired voice echoed through the speakers.

_"Who is this?"_

Might as well get started early. I had too much work laid out in front of me that needed doing, I could slack off once I'd actually made a dent in the monumental workload everyone else had been actively ignoring.

"Please send Marc Azéma up to the councillor's office, I've decided to book him in for his mandatory appointment right now."

Immediately, I could hear some sort of commotion on the other side of the call. The teacher must have had the call on speakerphone, for whatever dumbass reason. I could hear a male voice protesting this decision, likely the kid I'd chosen. I couldn't really remember his name, despite the fact that I'd just said it. If he decided to stick around, then I would bother to commit it to memory, but otherwise I had more pressing matters to attend to.

"Please inform him that I am a busy man." The teacher had been attempting to quiet down his class; all went silent as I continued to speak. One advantage of having a naturally low and somewhat husky voice, people generally paid attention if I raised it. "If he is not here in two minutes, I will hunt him down and drag him here by the nostrils."

I didn't give anyone time to say anything back, hanging up the tablet with a swipe of the screen and setting it off to the side with a sigh. The chair creaked as I leaned back, the wheels sounding like they were about to pop off at any second.

This office might never have been occupied. I knew that I was filling a position, but I think I may have been the first person in history to sit here with the intent to work.

From outside, the sounds of running footsteps and shouted words gradually grew closer. There was a scream that had something to do with nostrils, before a mighty crash right outside my door made it shake on its hinges. If the noises coming from the other side were anything to go by, there was every chance that I would have to deal with a face-shaped indent in the near future.

"…Fuck you, Fu."

This was  _absolutely_  going to take a while.


End file.
